• How-to

Let’s admit it—we all need validation. And if you’re running a business, validation is not just about pandering to your ego but about measuring the reach/impact of your brand. You’ve spent money, time and effort to make sure that you not only have a presence online but a solid social media strategy. So, you need to know whether it’s paying off; and to what extent. This could help in narrowing down which tools—whether it’s blogging, Twitter or Facebook—are working out the best for you.

Quantitatively measuring a brand’s online influence is not without its pitfalls. This is primarily so because influence and popularity are not the same thing. That said, there are some great tools today that go beyond just measuring your impact in terms of raw numbers. Here, we have compiled a list of some of the best influence measurement metric tools.

1.Klout: It has quickly grown to be one of the most popular choices for measuring individual and brand influence online. Klout uses its own algorithm to measure your influence (on Twitter and Facebook). The total klout score is calculated by your true reach (the size of your engaged audience) plus amplification (the likelihood that content will be clicked) plus network (the score of your engaged audience).

It also has something called the Influence Matrix, which measures your online personality and displays the level of engagement with your followers.

2. PeerIndex: PeerIndex collates data from social networks to determine what they refer to as ‘online social capital,’ which is basically the impact of your online activities. It offers an analytics dashboard, using eight benchmark topics that provide users with a closer look at the authority they command on the web.

3. Twitalyzer: Presented in the form of graphs and charts, Twitalyzer lets you assess the power of each individual tweet to find out which of your trends and topics are most popular. It collects hard data in the form of influence, engagement, velocity, reach and several other metrics which allows you to understand how you use Twitter. If you’re a subscriber, you get access to features like multiple-account and competitive account tracking.

4. Crowdbooster: As its name suggests, this tool (focuses exclusively on Twitter) not only shows you how well (or not) your brand is faring online but also advises you on what you can do to increase your score. Crowdbooster too allows you to analyze the impact of every individual tweet and helps you find out which of your followers are generating interest in your brand. In addition, there are other features such as recommendations of specific times during the day to tweet based on the times your most influential followers are most active.

5. Postrank: This calculates your overall social influence spanning a wide range of social networks, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious and Digg, to mention a few. Postrank helps in connecting brands with bloggers and publishers that are influential within their respective communities. It also offers a scoring system that calculates the level of engagement from your audience.

If you want to simply find out the influence of your company blog, the best indicator would be the comments, e-mails, RSS subscribers and the number of times your link has been tweeted. There are also sites like Alexa and Google PageRank that will help you with more concrete numbers.

©Entrepreneur April 2011

Tags:
brand, Crowdbooster, Klout, metric tools, PeerIndex, Postrank, social media, strategy, Twitalyzer