Tools To Measure Your Social Media Influence

Meaningful exchanges constantly take place all over the social Web on a variety of platforms, connecting people and enabling them to share, critique, and interact with content and with each other. The type of information we share reveals a lot about who we are, who we know, and what we know — people tend to talk about the things they care about/are most knowledgeable about with others who are interested in similar subjects. The impact of those relationships affects our Web authority.

Social influence occurs when a person’s thoughts, feelings, or actions are affected by others. Essentially, influence is the art of persuasion — the ability to cause a change in mindset or actions so someone thinks or behaves in a certain way. In the world of social media marketing, influence is currency. In order to raise awareness, foster brand advocacy, win attention, and generate real-world action, businesses want to know the answers to questions like:

• Who are the influencers in my brand category and how do I find them?
• What are they saying about my brand?
• How many of my Twitter followers are clicking my links and retweeting my content?
• Does my Facebook page create the kind of engagement I’d hoped?
• What is my brand’s “true reach”?

Measuring online influence is difficult at best. How can it be calculated? How do companies validate that that their messaging is is working? For the most part, marketers have been limited to piecemeal metrics like followers, likes, and page views. Now a variety of influence-scoring platforms are emerging to help personal and corporate brands determine just how influential they are and locate influencers in their industry. Here are a few tools to get you started with benchmarking:

Klout

Klout measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage, you influence others, and your Klout Score measures that influence on a scale of 1 to 100. Using data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, Klout measures how many people you influence (true reach), how much you influence them (amplification), and how influential they are (network score), and assigns a score from 1 to 100.

PostRank

PostRank monitors and collects social engagement events correlated with online content in real time across the Web. It gathers data about where and when stories generate comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interaction from 20 of the top social networks. It tracks where and how users engage, and what they pay attention to — its social engagement data measures actual user activity, the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a site, story, or author.

TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet is a metrics aggregator for all your social media and Web properties. It pulls and generates metrics from Twitter, Facebook, bit.ly, YouTube, Google Analytics, MySpace, FriendFeed, and RSS feeds and displays them in a slick interface all in one place. It also notifies you whenever something noteworthy happens.

PeerIndex

The PeerIndex algorithm measures the speed with which we find and share content on any specific topic, as well as the volume of our sharing. Authority on a subject is affirmed when the content you share is approved, i.e. retweeted or commented on, by someone else that is an authority on the subject. It gauges activity on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to come up with a score.

Empire Avenue

Empire Avenue calls itself the Social Stock Market. It’s inherently a social networking game that allows you to connect with individuals based on “value relationships” — the much closer relationships than just having someone follow you on Twitter or Like you on Facebook. The platform can be used to find highly engaged individuals around the world across a wide variety of interests. It enables brands to get in front of new, engaged audiences and connect with relevant customers in a fun environment across 150+ countries.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social allows businesses to efficiently and effectively manage and grow their social presence across multiple channels and turn social connections into loyal customers. The application integrates with Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla, and other networks where consumers are engaging with businesses and brands. In addition to communication tools, Sprout Social offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, reporting, analytics, and more in a package that’s intuitive and easy to use.

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster helps you achieve an effective presence on Twitter and Facebook. It shows you analytics that aren’t based on abstract scores, but numbers that are connected to your business and your social media strategies: impressions, total reach, engagement, and more. It then give you the tools and recommendations you need to take action and improve each one of these metrics.

Have you tried any of these tools? I’d love to hear about your experiences and whether or not you’ve found any of them helpful. I’m sure there are tools that I’m not aware of, so please share them in the comments below.

What Type of Social Media Ads Should a Brand Use?

As new ways to engage consumers and market products on the social Web keep multiplying, it’s important to stay well-informed of best practices for brands. Research firm Psychster partnered with Allrecipes.com to find out which types of advertising yield the best results.

The study tested 7 different types of ads on two different publisher Web sites, Facebook and Allrecipes:

1. Banner ads
2. Newsletter subscription ads
3. Corporate profiles with fans and logos
4. Corporate profiles without fans and logos
5. Get widgets
6. Give widgets
7. Sponsored content

Participants were shown a video of an ad type and an interaction and were asked to rate how likely they were to interact with the ad as the video did. They were also asked what their opinion was of the brand sponsoring the ads (either a car brand or a soup brand).

Results:

• Banner ads and newsletter links were the most successful at encouraging purchase.
• Sponsored content produced the highest interaction ratings, but the lowest purchase intent and viral recommendations of the 7 ad types. So this type of ad may be a good marketing strategy for raising brand awareness and generating positive associations/brand engagement, but isn’t the best choice for increasing sales.
• Corporate profiles caused higher purchase intent only when people could become a fan and put a logo on their own profile.
• Give and get widgets were more engaging than banners and newsletters, but they didn’t increase purchase intent or the likelihood of recommending a product to a friend. Since widgets are pricey, tweets and links may be a better choice.
• The success of an ad was increased by matching the brand with the Web site (e.g. a soup ad on a recipe site).

Takeaways:

• If your goals are brand awareness and positive associations, sponsored content may be your best bet.
• If you’re trying to increase purchasing and loyalty, go with profiles that allow people to become fans and add logos to their own profiles.
• If you’re targeting purchasing and the best ROI, good old banners and newsletters rule.

Do you agree with this or are there any other social media ads that are more effective than the ones mentioned? feel free to comment 

Unlucky 7 - Bad Social Media Marketing

L'Oreal faked it

L’Oreal’s social media presence took a huge hit when it was revealed that they created a fake blog. Push marketing in the social media space is always a bad idea, especially when it’s this blatant. Don't create fake testimonials or blogs. Ever.

Dell Hell

Dell's reputation went up in smoke after tech blog Gizmodo published this photo of an exploding Dell laptop. This single image spread like wildfire across the blogosphere, causing Dell to eventually recall over four million laptop batteries. 

Dell eventually responded to the blogs, but it was the delayed response that put a cap on the period known as "Dell Hell." They should have responded sooner. A single image can be powerful. Use social media to stomp out fires before they turn into wildfires.

Dominos Pizza "extra toppings"

                                          

Two employees post a video on YouTube that grosses out an entire nation of pizza goers. What saved this from being anything more than a goof, however, was the reaction of then USA Domino's president, Patrik Doyle. 

He gave a well-worded apology and took full responsibility. Others should have been paying attention to this.Organisations should create social media guidelines for the entire company

Red Cross gets slizzerd

It was an innocent mistake. The Red Cross's social media specialist (who was an intern) meant to send this tweet from his personal Twitter profile - not from the @Red Cross account. 

Like Dominos, however, the Red Cross did a great job of owning up to the mistake, and even poked fun out of themselves in a later tweet. It was a big goof, but not a total fail. Organisations should have a system of checks and balances in place for your social media efforts.  Don't expect interns to handle the full load by themselves.

Chrysler hates Detroit drivers

It'd be different if this tweet came from Honda or even BMW: not a great idea, but it would be different. But this message came from Chrysler, the same company spending millions on the "Imported from Detroit" campaign. 

Making this situation even worse was Chrysler's excuse that the account was "hacked." Even though this could be true, Chrysler should have taken a page from Red Cross and Dominos.In social media always apologize: even when it's not entirely your fault.

You don’t own your hashtag.

McDonald’s found out the hard way that you can’t verbify everything. They initially tried to use the hashtag #McDStories on Twitter to showcase positive stories around McDonald’s. But instead, they a backlash of negative press ensued. They should have learned their lesson from Wendy’s #HeresTheBeef campaign four months prior.

QR Codes on Billboards = What were they thinking?

I don’t care how compelling you or your product is, no one is going to scan a QR code (not even the passenger) when driving down the freeway.

What marketers should learn from this

Push marketing rarely works as a social media strategy. Instead of releasing a standard press release, use a multitude of social media channels to interact with your audience.  Doing so makes your message much more likely to be spread.    

And if you're using social media, make sure you take it on seriously. Create the proper support channels and oversight so that mistakes don't happen, because once your message is out there in the universe, it can't be taken down easily. 

But if mistakes are made, be prepared to go through the appropriate social media channels to push an apology message out there. And make sure that while pushing your apology message out there that you're interacting with disgruntled customers. 

Not only will this demonstrate to the world that you are listening, but also that you are truly empathetic.