I’ve been thinking a lot about online influence recently. There seems to be a craze about free ranking platforms such as popular and most commonly known Klout and PeerIndex. It’s become an obsession for some. Others are sprouting up all the time – Twitter Grader and TwentyFeet being just two more out there.
And everyone seems to have an opinion on this. What’s more, some businesses won’t even interview a candidate unless their rating is 50 or higher on Klout…
Alright, I confess…I use both Klout and PeerIndex. For two reasons: to see who the influencers are that I need to reach out and engage with for PR campaigns, and also how I rank against peers in my industry. The higher their ranking, the more I need to convert them into being our advocates. The higher my ranking, the more notice these people will take of me.
There is obviously a demand for these things, and so the market will therefore grow and these tools will become more and more sophisticated and therefore accurate. The great thing about social media, of course, is how it’s democratised the Internet and given a voice to everyone. You don’t need to be a media mogul, politician or celebrity to be heard and considered an “influencer”.
Scoring
For the likes of Klout and PeerIndex, you will be ranked with a score of between 1 and 100. We all understand this – it’s like a percentage…100% is the best and 1% is pretty poor. However, Klout’s average score is in the high teens, with a score in the 40s indicating that you have a strong, but niche following. PeerIndex’s average is the same while it describes a perfect 100 as “god-like”.
But how do you become influential? I’m naturally cynical and so had some healthy cynicism about how these tools harvest our digital profiles to “score” us.
Sure it can’t be just a numbers game based on the number of followers you have and how many times you get retweeted (RT’d) on Twitter, and on Facebook how many friends and ‘Likes’ you have.
Gaming your score
Just like computer games, you can work out how to cheat the system to artificially inflate your social score. Here are some examples of gaming, particularly on Twitter:
- On PeerIndex, you could link your profile to websites and blogs (such as BBC, Techcrunch and our Corporate blog) that you do not produce original content for or have anything to do with. This would boost your ranking apparently
- You can literally buy 1000s and 1000s of followers
- You could follow 1000s and 1000s, and expect some of them to automatically follow you back – but you probably wouldn’t have any interaction with any of them
- Tweet every minute of every day, all day, every day – the volume alone will help boost your score. But you would really annoy a lot of people in the process and negate your actual influence!
- You can build an army of advocates and agree amongst this targeted community to RT and favourite everything each of you tweet about – mutually beneficial for all in that community
Imagine if all of a company’s employees, say 500 of them, adopted this last technique whenever one of the corporate Twitter handles sent a tweet out. That’s one tweet ‘favourited’ 500 times and amplified by 500 individuals to all of their followers – pretty powerful multiplication.
For me, surely it’s far more important that people are engaging on social networks…having conversations. Engaging. Not simply broadcasting their opinion to the social Web with no interaction.
The variables
There are plenty, but have got to be taken into account by any ranking system…but not all of them are yet.
- Number of followers
- Who are these followers – based on just volume alone it really means nothing; based on what these followers are like individually (as the below bullets highlight), would be far more accurate
- The number you’re following
- As above, who are you following – are they influential etc.
- Followers to following ratio
- A ratio of 2:1 is far better than the typical 1:2, for example
- How many times do you get RT’d? (an indication that the content you produce is influential and relevant to your followers)
- Of those who RT, how many followers/RT’s/conversations/etc do they have?
- How many times do you get mentioned
- Of those who mention you, how many followers/RT’s/conversations/etc do they have?
- How often do you have a conversation with someone else?
- Of those you have a convo with, how many followers/RT’s/conversations/etc do they have?
- Do you have lengthy convos, or do you simply have a couple of tweets back & forth?
- Does your conversation pattern spread across a significant percentage of your followers, or just a few select ones that you actually have a relationship with?
- How many times does your content get ‘favourited’?
- Of those who favourite your tweets, how many followers/RT’s/conversations/etc do they have?
- How many times do the links you tweet out actually get clicked on?
- Of those who click on the links, how many followers/RT’s/conversations/etc do they have?
Refreshingly, the people behind these free tools are fully aware that they’re still in their infancy – they acknowledged that they need to become more comprehensive in how they source data, need to pull from more online sources (beyond just Twitter, Facebook and, lately, LinkedIn), and also become more granular.
Food for thought at least, and I’m sure you all have an opinion on this too
