Social marketing can get you the exposure, traffic, engagement and sales that you are looking for.
Although social media influence can mean different things to different people, the general consensus is that your social media influence is your ability to have your messages seen, acted on and passed on to others. If you have a low amount of influence, you aren’t connected with enough people and don’t have enough respect in your niche community to make a measurable impact. As you grow your influence you’ll find it easier to get the results that you are looking for from social media.
TwentyFeet – This tool relies on data for Twitter and Facebook to determine your social media scores. What makes the difference in this monitoring tool is that it presents all your data in graph form. This makes it very easy to take notice of how your influence is growing, or shrinking! The stats are broken down into friends, followers, retweets, mentions and comments on your Facebook updates.
Klout – Klout got a lot of attention recently when they received some major investments from outside sources. Klout is measurement tool that takes several social media sites into account to determine a two digit score that measures your influence. It views your influence on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN and provides a combined score for all three. Klout is becoming a social media industry standard and is being used by other social media monitoring tools, like Hootsuite and Seeismic.
TweetStats – If you want to get a good look at how your Twitter account is faring, TweetStats is a good resources to use. You just enter your Twitter user name and then you’re able to get a peek at how you’re performing on Twitter. TweetStats can show you which days and times of days you’re most active with bar graphs. There are also bar graphs for who you interact with most often. TweetStats offers a unique feature called TweetCloud which shows you the topics that you Tweet about most often in cloud form, as the name implies.
Twylah – Unlike to other tools that measure your overall influence Twylah offers some unique benefits that are specific to this tool. Twylah is a social media tool that extends the life of your Tweets. By registering for the website, your Tweets will automatically be created into a stand alone website that is organized by topics. Once you’ve used Twylah for several weeks you’ll be able to see your stats and influence in your backend dashboard. Twylah’s dashboard will alert you to topics that are important to your followers.
With these four tools and consistent social media usage, you can measure your influence and ensure that your time spent on social media is useful and productive.
But don’t forget to engage, meet new people, and have fun!
Darren Olander
P.S. Another fun way to measure your social influence is through a web based game called Empire Avenue – it’s a social stock market game.