Marketing on Twitter is largely about influence, unless you simply want to use it as a customer service channel. You either want to co-opt people who are influential on the platform, or become influential yourself.
Some people think that influence on Twitter can be determined simply by looking at the number of followers a person has, but this is crude – you have no idea how that person grew their follower base, to what extent people actually pay attention to what they are tweeting about, or how many of their followers are active. Another approach is to survey other Twitter users in your target segment about how you or others influence them, but this will be subjective and time-consuming. So the most viable approach I’ve found is to use analytics tools.
One of the best Twitter analytics tools I’ve yet used is called Klout. It measures your influence, or “Klout” on Twitter. I found the output, the KloutScore fascinating and insightful, so I wanted to know what variables they use to get their results.
Influence on Twitter, according to Klout, can be derived from the following variables:
Engagement
o How diverse is the group that @ messages you?
o Are you broadcasting or participating in conversation?
Reach
o Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
o How far has your content been spread across Twitter?
Velocity
o How likely are you to be retweeted?
o Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?
Demand
o How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?
o Are your follows often reciprocated?
Network Strength
o How influential are the people who @ message you?
o How influential are the people that retweet you?
Activity
o Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience?
o Are your tweets effective in generating new followers, retweets and @ replies?
So, you may be wondering how you can raise your level of influence. Well, according to Klout, it’s simple:
Just use Twitter on a regular basis, say interesting things and engage with people and your score will inevitably start to go up.
To that I’d also add: use Twitter analysis tools to help you understand where you could perform better!
Just tried this out after your tweet – very cool tool, I enjoy the “influence” aspects on it as well. Very well put together.
I bumped into Klout yesterday too, and played with it a bit, and yes it’s very nice. I was left feeling a little empty on a single variable though, which is trust.
How do we establish how much I trust someone on twitter, because that trust is contextual, for example I’m far more likely to trust you regarding ORM than say my boxing coach, but if I’m in the ring,and Dave I mean no disrespect, I’m not sure I want you in my corner.
I suspect influence can only be measurable as the semantic web rises with more ubiquitous metadata.
Signed up, just waiting for my account to get indexed now, sounds interesting!
@Minaar Thanks, hope it helps
@Guy Haha! If I was your boxing coach I would advise you to run the other direction from the punches! Good point though. Combining the influence score with the subject analysis (also in Klout, but there are others) would give you some idea of what subject the person has influence in (which may be akin to trust in that topic)
Nice point, thanks Dave
Another thought:
The subject analysis would have to be very clever, if you’re just trending on subjects it makes it easy to create “influence” around a subject by being a marketer.
I’m very aware of which campaigns my friends belong to for companies, and right them off as respectable sources for trusted information on their clients accordingly.
Trust and Context, it’s the new black baby.
Dave,
I am the CEO and one of the co founders of Klout. Sorry to jump in late here but just wanted to say thank you for checking out what we are working on here. I am glad you pointed out the issue with just looking at a person’s follower count when trying to figure out their influence. Influence drives action. Whether it’s a @ reply, a retweet or a click on a link we put a lot of effort in to making sure that the Klout scores are highly correlated to these actions. Just recently we completed a report for a major brand who had been focusing on engaging with people who had high follower counts. Analyzing click counts we were able to show that people with low Klout influence scores but huge follower numbers (>5000) actually drove less traffic then people with follower counts as low as 150 but high levels of influence.
Guy,
I agree with you 100% that contextual trust is key. As a huge boxing fan and fighter also I don’t necessarily care what top of mobile phone my trainer might recommend but I will take his opinion about the Pacquioao fight very seriously. We are actually doing a bunch of this analysis behind the scenes. There is a lot of work to be done but we will be launching a new version very soon to start getting feedback from the community.
Joe, thanks for popping in here. You guys are onto a good thing. I look forward to seeing how your service develops.
Don’t know what you have in mind for business models, but I wouldn’t mind paying for premium analytics reports for clients. Let me know if you want some input on what kind of stuff they might value.
I’ve also just signed up. I’ve used twitter badly in the past, listening to horrible advice and auto-following everyone who did me and using as a broadcast channel.
I hope to change that pattern now
thanks for the post. I also find Twitalyzer to be really powerful.
http://twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/index.asp
@Haroun Excellent, this is exactly how these tools should be used – to help us use channels like Twitter more meaningfully.
@Uwe I just gave Twitalyser a test run with my own username, but didn’t think the output described me at all! I’ll bookmark it anyway and keep an eye on its development. Thanks for the headsup.