This is a republished article from my Friday column at iStrategy where I answer questions from twitter users. Enjoy!
What, in your opinion, is a better indication of influence: total of lists you’re on, retweets, followers or other? from @rslaats.
Here is an example:
I believe that all three of the Twitter users listed above are influential in their own areas of music, entertainment and technology. Justin Bieber dominates the list with the highest numbers throughout the four sections. We can see that he’s got the highest Klout score, follows the most people, has the most followers and is listed the most. Mashable and Ashton Kutcher have nearly the same Klout scores, as well as being listed the same number of times, despite Ashton Kutcher having four million more followers than Mashable.
If I were to indicate someone’s influence, I would like to start off with their Klout score because I feel that Klout scores give a rough idea of how “busy” their Twitter stream is. Justin Bieber’s Klout score indicates that he is definitely the busiest, and it makes sense because he has got an overwhelming amount of fans.
Mashable would be the second busiest due to the popularity of their blog and the amount of retweets that they receive. This comparison is especially important because, although Ashton Kutcher has a much greater number of followers, the Klout scores indicate that Mashable is more influential. Therefore, Klout would definitely be my first choice because Klout calculates the overall outlay of the user’s Twitter activity.
Secondly, I look at the number of times listed. I feel that Twitter users who have been listed more than 1,000 times have clearly shown that they have developed a reputation. Therefore, being listed a large number of times indicates a high amount of influence in one’s niche. I’ve seen Twitter users that have more than 50,000 followers but have been listed less than 200 times. This could indicate that although the respective user has a high amount of followers, he/she has not been very influential in their respective fields.
Third, I would look at the number of followers a person has. I feel that if a twitter user is influential, he or she would have a decent amount of followers. People who are new to social media will look at these criteria more than others. For me, this would be the third. A lot of influential people usually stay under the radar; it’s tough to judge someone based on their followers completely.
Finally, as for the amount a twitter user is following, I don’t really judge this number in its entirety because people like Chris Brogan and I usually follow back those who follow me, and allow people to connect with me directly via private messages. So it is only natural that I follow a high number of people. This metric, alone, does not mean that I am influential. It simply means that I am sociable. The number of people one follows, is therefore an indicator of how social they are on Twitter.
Other indicators of influence would be blogs: if the person in question has one and if so look at the amount of blog traffic, influential users usually have a decent amount of blog traffic. Blog traffic and comments, in addition to looking at the number of tweets they post, is a measure of their level of engagement with their community.
Despite all of these analytics, I feel that judging influence is more than just looking at numbers. However, if I were asked to quantify influence, I would definitely start from the indicators I’ve mentioned. If you would like to understand more about influence, one blog I recommend you to watch Tom’s online influence video.
What are your thoughts?
photo credits: holah.karoo
Hi Aaron,
Very interesting post. I enjoyed it very much. 🙂
I think the reason Justin Bieber has a klout influential score of 100 is because he is currently on his tour and his fans are tweeting about him all the time. He is actively tweeting as well.
To me influence is the number of people who are actually following you.
Cheers!
Gloson
Aaron, I really like the way you distinguish based upon context, which I think a lot of discussions re: influence don’t really factor for.
Thanks Ed, wanted to oversee more factors of course based on those factors we still can’t judge someones influence. 🙂
Its possible indeed, he is indeed actively tweeting about the tours etc. Moreover he has 8 million fans now, I can imagine his twitter stream going crazy even though he post a photo of himself.
“To me influence is the number of people who are actually following you.” love this quote. Will be using this in a future post. I have something similar which I want to cover. Cheers my friend. Glad to see you here.
Aaron
Hi Aaron, I like the way you analyse influence though I also believe that someone’s influence should be based on the influence a person’s followers have. Let’s say someone has fewer followers but those are rather influential the effects can be quite extensive. I hope my thought process here makes sense. 🙂
You make a lot of sense Antonia, it was something I consider too, although its tough to measure their followers influence since its tough to go through every list. UNLESS, klout one day lets us to check a person’s followers and arrange them according to klout from highest to lowest. Now that would be great.
So far, peerindex is able to do so. Amazing tools.
Great Insight that i will have to take heed to. I will definitely use this to my advantage
Thanks Robert! Cheers!
Excellent post Aaron…
Nice work Aaron looks like I will take a few ideas with me from this one.
Feel free to do so 🙂
Thanks Dave, thanks for taking the time to comment 🙂
Aaron.. Great post. I agree that lists are a great way to get a fast feel for the type of user a person is.. since people have to take that extra step to add you to a list.
For me.. I’m like you.. I look at RTs.. I have seen people with 50,000 to 100,000 followers yet can not get 10 RTs on a post.
For me that tells me you followers are “numbers” not people you have actually engaged with.
To find true influence you have to look a lil deeper, exactly how you layed it out here.
I like the idea of the number of Lists. I run my company’s Twitter account and I don’t get a lot of engagement, but the List number will be interesting to track. Thanks!
I like to use both klout and twittergrader because I get a better picture of the tweeter. Also, I like to look at the quality of a person’s tweets. A person can tweet #teamfollow or #teamfollowBack or #IfollowBack to gain followers but when they get those followers do they talk with them? probably not. Thanks for writing this post!
@CreativeEditor
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It’s great that you included contextual influence in your thoughts or calculations. I still think so many people are approaching the question of influence on Twitter (and in general) completely the wrong way. When you say, “who is the most influential person on Twitter?”, what do you really mean? The person who is most influential to me will not be the most influential to you. And similarly, the person who is most influential to me about things like social media measurement is definitely not the same person I find influential for the best restaurants in my neighborhood.
Influence is completely situational and contextual. All of the metrics you described above have to be taken from that perspective. Why look at Klout scores overall? If you’re looking at influencers around social media, only focus on the Klout scores of those folks. And so on.
“A lot of influential people usually stay under the radar; it’s tough to judge someone based on their followers completely.”
So true, especially for people are influential in their fields, but are new to social media. Many of my clients are in this predicament. They’ve built their business. Now they’re building followings on other networks, which isn’t the easiest of tasks.
“A lot of influential people usually stay under the radar; it’s tough to judge someone based on their followers completely.”
So true, especially for people are influential in their fields, but are new to social media. Many of my clients are in this predicament. They’ve built their business. Now they’re building followings on other networks, which isn’t the easiest of tasks.
As someone mentioned, the context surely matters. Very few are influential beyond context. Mashable is 2nd to none on Social Media and Web. Bieber for entertainment maybe!
“if you do not tweet klout forget your score”; and I wonder how the dalailama has a great klout score even if he does not reply and do not follow anybody.
I mean klout needs an algorithm where if the influence as to be also intended as for the dalailama; I mean he does not need to: retweet, to reply or to follow in order to get a great and above all stable score.
Here is what I mean: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/unsociable-celebrities_b10135