Best Tools to Measure and Track Your Influence
Tracking your influence on the Internet is a tricky business, but the fact that social media is so popular is actually a big help.
People used to visit forums to voice their opinion and picking through the relevant ones was a very difficult job (it still is) unless you were to check them manually. Worse still, people used to use chat rooms which is even more un-trackable since the data was often held on temp files on servers which were gone within the week. Now that social media is popular it has become easier to track your online influence.
If you are popular enough the seep onto the mainstream Internet and into the blogging community then there are ways to track that too. There are tools on this article that will help you track your influence online. Each item on the list does something slightly different, which is why the list is in no particular order.
Cyfe
This is a social media-monitoring tool, which has taken on search engine based functions. Visit the website and look near the bottom to see a happy bunch of icons representing the things they are monitoring, although some are not as clearly obvious as you may think. For example, being very much in the Google area is understandable but iTunes is not immediately obvious until you remember that people give reviews on apps and if your app is in there then it can flag them for you.
It is a dashboard that pulls analytic data mostly from the social media networks, which is really what powers this app. It does mine information from other areas and the Google search engine so you may see a slightly broader view of your online presence and subsequent influence. You could see if your influence extends so that posts on social media networks have an impact on the mainstream Internet community.
If you make a big splash then it will even tell you via things such as changing the trends of keywords relating to your business or your industry. Like most tools of this ilk, you have to understand and optimize to get the most out of it. For example, if you were to ask for it to pull in results from your brand and you entered your brand but spelt it wrong, then you can hardly expect it to perform well.
Quantcast
This is one of those tools that is easy to love and easy to trust. Its job is to measure your influence across the in the Internet using audience reports and information from websites across the Internet. It is a rather boring tool if your website is not doing very well as it will show you nothing.
Enter your domain name in the search bar on the home page. In addition, it comes up with a few results but the website is yearning for you to sign up before you get too excited. This is a popular tool that many people use to measure their influence, and even though we cannot be sure of how well it is doing, it is safe to assume that it is better to have their information than to go without it. Add it to the results of your other tools and it may become easier to find your results.
Klout
This is a tool that monitors Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn, and you have to remember that using more than one tool is vital so that they may check the accuracy of your other tools. It measures your influence and then gives you a score on how influential it is on a scale of one to one hundred. It uses its own scoring system and shows you the true reach, the network score and the amplification.
Sumall
This social media analytic tool pulls information from social media networks to present to you via the tool. It also sneakily mines data from Google Analytics so you may see more than social media metrics. It is not really tool that stands out, but you do need numerous tools to check your influence and this is a standard one you may use. Do not base your decisions on its results but take note of what it says when your other influence trackers are giving contradicting results.
Google Analytics
You should be looking for indicators as to how you are popular and unpopular. The mood of your target audience is hard to gauge, which is why we often have to judge them by their actions. When your traffic land on your website they may act in a certain way and their actions may be quite telling.
Lingering for a while on a page before moving to another is a good sign, especially if that person navigates down a funnel and converts. On the other hand, if a person lingers for a long time and leaves then that person may have misunderstood your page or have simply not been suited for it. The same goes for a person who bounces and a lot of people bouncing means that there is something wrong with the traffic source, link or landing page as the people arriving on the site are not converting and may not be the target audience.
As you can tell from just those few small assumptions (a few lying in a sea of many), there is a lot to figure out through how people act on your website and the Google Analytics program can show you how they are acting whilst they are on your website. You may also draw other conclusions about your popularity and influence by quantitative mean such as how high up the search engine results you are, how much traffic comes from which site, how much traffic you have per day and how many organic backlinks you appear to be picking up. Google Analytics can help you figure all of that out for yourself by giving you the raw data. They will also give you hints as you build your website to become more search engine friendly. They give you warning such as if you have unnatural backlinks.
Alexa
Alexa is the less popular ranking system behind Google PageRank and that is because the Alexa ranking system is easier to manipulate. But, if you know how to manipulate the system then you will recognize when another person has done it. That way if someone is trying to charge you $40 to post a blog on their highly Alexa-ranked blog then you can tell them to rightly get stuffed because you recognize that it is a manipulated score.
If you go out of your way not to manipulate the Alexa toolbar then it can go some way to showing you how popular your website is and consequently may show you how popular and influential your brand, products or company is too.
Alexa uses its toolbar to log which websites a person visits and therefore ranks them accordingly. Web masters are the ones that most frequently install the Alexa toolbar, so if a website is posting content and tools that primarily appeals to webmasters then do not believe their Alexa Rank because it has been manipulated.
PeerIndex
Each influence building campaign is going to have its own goals and will have its own way of doing things. This tool is mostly about checking the speed at which your message is disseminated. It comes in handy if you have important time sensitive information, as if your message is not getting through fast enough then you may continue posting until it does.
The other thing about the speed your message disseminates and is shared and passed along is how this function reflects on your influence. If you are fairly influential such as Oprah is on Twitter, then your messages are not going to take as long to seep through the mesh of the world of social media than a person or profile that is unpopular or not very well-known. It also monitors the volume, which is an obvious signal of your influence since the more popular you are then the more likely your content is to be shared around on mass. That is unless you accidentally (or purposefully) create viral content that spreads around irrespective of your online influence.
Hootsuite
This is a well-known measuring and tracking tool that focuses on Twitter but also has functions that allow it to work with other large social media networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. It is an organizer tool on one hand with tools to help you manage your messages across numerous social media profiles. It also has tracking and analytics functions that help you track your own influence across social media networks.
The most powerful social media website for building and creating influence is Twitter, which is why it pays to have tools like Hootsuite keeping a watch on things.
Appinions
This is a platform that is opinion powered in which you may be identified as an influencer as well as being able to identify other influencers. It concentrates on opinions that it pulls for blogs and articles and content such as TV and radio transcripts. As an influencer you create content about yourself that you put online and you will notice that more about you appears on the app. In a way, it is a good method of measuring the effectiveness of your own efforts in trying to make yourself more of an expert. You can analyze yourself, others and engage with others through this tool. It also pulls data from digitized newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, magazines and online articles.
EdgeRank
You may have heard of MOZ Rank but probably not the EdgeRank. It is a Facebook only ranking system that tells you which of your Facebook posts are the most popular and most viral and which are going to appear in your friends and followers newsfeeds. Ideally, you are supposed to learn from what you see in order to improve your influence and the effectiveness of your Facebook posts. It can be quite eye-opening when you see just how little effect you have on the massive Facebook world.
Crowdbooster
You should be using all of the tools you have at your disposal to improve the range and effect of your social media influence, not to mention the actual mood of it being that you are trying to create a positive image. Sadly, it only works with Twitter and Facebook, but it is a fairly sophisticated tool as they go and it helps you at first monitor your influence over those two social media networks and then helps you improve your influence–and they throw in a content scheduler too.
Sprout Social
This tool helps you grow and improve your influence across a number of social media networks. It will integrate into LinkedIn, Facebook Fan pages, Twitter and Foursquare. It allows you to manage your social media activities and view analytics on how well things are going. It helps you with lead generation, competitive insight and reporting.
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