Measuring your social media influence

As an advisor and consultant, I’m in the business of influencing people. I try to influence the decisions my clients make and I try to influence prospective clients to work with me. I also use my influence in professional settings to articulate compelling strategies and win recommendations – and referrals – from other professionals.

This is why the rise of influence scoring in social media is something I feel I cannot afford to ignore. If you’re an advising professional, I’d suggest you pay attention too.

If you haven’t been living in a cave for the past few years, you’ve noticed the proliferation of social media tools and sites. We go to these online social spaces to make connections (LinkedIn), add friends (Facebook), and follow people (Twitter) with whom we share content, discuss topics and generally interact.

As we get more involved, we start paying attention to the metrics of social media. We compare the number of connections we have on LinkedIn and wonder how many is the right amount. We wonder how (and why) some people are amassing small towns of followers on Twitter when we just have a handful. We also notice qualitative measures like who is responding to us and who is online more often. We start paying attention to the person who shares the most valuable information and we start watching for their material because it stands out from the crowd. Some people just seem smarter and more interesting because of what they choose to share. Thus, we ascribe to them more influence – in our digital lives, at least.

Like it or not, social media tools and metrics are increasingly being used to measure online influence. And I’m not just talking about doing head counts of friends and followers. Social media tools are able to track all kinds of aspects of our behaviour online, such as: whose content am I most likely to share with others and who is most likely to share mine.

Through tracking and analyzing these kinds of online behaviours, a growing number of social media meta-sites are attempting to quantify – and qualify – who among us have the most influence. I refer to these sites as meta because they sit atop other social media channels and track your activities within them in order to provide an analytical layer of interpretation.

Three such sites are emerging as leaders and are worthy of attention.

Klout.com is one of the fastest growing influence measurement tools. There, you create an account and identify your sites of social media activity – Twitter account, Facebook account, blog feeds, etc. – and Klout begins tracking your activity. They also track the activity and profiles of your friends, connections and followers in an effort to calculate the size of your real audience. For instance, when you tweet something to your 200 followers and one of them retweets it to their 2000 followers, your audience is bigger. In the end, your Klout score takes all of this into consideration in calculating how influential you are.

PeerIndex.net performs a similar calculation as Klout, but with the addition of a layer of subject matter analysis. Peerindex looks for indicators of what subjects you talk about most frequently which they represent in a nice graph. Peerindex also calculates an influence score and shows who is influencing you and who you influence through a variety of useful charts and tables.

EmpireAvenue.com may appeal to financial professionals the most because of the market trading metaphor it employs so creatively. In addition to tracking your social media activities as Klout and PeerIndex do, on EmpireAvenue you represent yourself as tradable shares in which your friends, connections and followers can invest. Here, the goal is both to increase your own share value, while also investing in others and amassing virtual wealth. So, the thinking goes, when somebody discovers a great blog article youve written and sees that you’re also on EmpireAvenue, they may be inclined to buy some shares in you based on the assessment that your value is bound to grow over time. In other words, here is another way to measure your potential online influence.

Without a doubt, each of these influence measurement sites can be shown to have shortcomings in various aspects and many commentators argue quite persuasively that they are not reflective of real world influence. However, you can be sure that over time two things will happen: these influence calculations will be fine-tuned to be more accurate AND our digital presence and personal branding footprints will become more important in our business lives.

Viewed as a whole and in aggregate, sites such as Klout, PeerIndex and EmpireAvenue are pointing us in the direction of an emerging influence economy of the (nearer-than-you-think) future.

If you’re in the business of influencing peoples decisions, now is not the time to have your social capital sitting on the sidelines.