Whatever your sector, industry or interest, it is easier than ever to figure out who are the thought leaders and influencers. The other side of the coin is that you can also figure out how influential you are in a particular area.
Here are three tools to investigate:
Klout: www.Klout.com uses one or more of your social networking accounts (Twitter, Personal Facebook or Facebook Page, Instagram, Google+, Linked-In, Foursquare, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Last.fm, Flickr, and Yammer) to generate a score from 1 to 100. Klout measures against a common standard and gives an objective raw score. The score itself is driven by other users actions within a social network (e.g. shares, retweets).
Klout has a perks program partly to reward you for activities that increase your influence and partly to have you part with some basic personal information (birthdate, location) to enable Klout to track you. Klout’s key recommendation is that you generate content to increase your influence. Klout for Business was launched in 2013 and enables businesses to establish which of their audience members within social media are most influential.
Little Bird: www.getlittlebird.com came to prominence in 2012 thanks in part to a $1m investment from Shark Tanker Mark Cuban. You can try it for free but after one month you’ll be paying a substantial subscription. Little Bird uses multiple social networks to build a picture of the overall network on any given topic. It can tell you whether the network is concentrated or dispersed. It calculates how many insiders are in the network and reports on how many other insiders are connected to each one.
A Little Bird report also lists the bloggers and their most recent posts, a great way to get insights into any given topic. There is a neat visualization tool that illustrates the network and a map that shows where insiders are concentrated.
Followerwonk: www.followerwonk.com can be used to track your followers on Twitter. You can use it to dive deep: searching Twitter bios, analyzing and tracking followers. It is subscription based but has a 30 day free trial.
Followerwonk is great for figuring out which of your followers have social authority and are therefore most influential. It can be used to identify bloggers using and keywords you choose. It’s a very helpful research tool.
