SocMetrics: A Better Standard for Influence

The concept of “influence” is very hot among PR, social media and community management folks these days. Everyone wants to discover the secret formula for influence, and there are several tools that claim to accurately measure influence. However, these tools–for example, Klout and Twitalyzer–are mostly measures of popularity on Twitter. Klout bills itself as “The Standard for Influence,” yet only pulls data from Twitter and Facebook.

Enter SocMetrics. I heard about SocMetrics from a Community Roundtable member call and was super impressed. I liked it because, while Klout measures only Facebook and Twitter activity, SocMetrics actually looks at the content people create, as well as the activity their content generates–tweets, shares, subscriptions, comments, etc. SocMetrics focuses on topical influence–that is, influence on a certain topic or in a certain vertical, as well as how concentrated his/her followers are within that topic.

For example, say your association deals with technology and wants to reach out to moms who are influential on that topic. You can pull a report of influencers in technology who are also moms.

Then you can check out each influencer–see what their spheres of influence are, their reach and engagement, their reach by platform, and even granular information like how frequently they blog and what their blog’s monthly page views are.

A lot more comprehensive and useful information than, say, how likely their tweets are to be retweeted.

I have no affiliation with SocMetrics, nor are they paying me to pimp them–I was just very impressed with the platform and think that as far as “standard for online influence” goes, they come a lot closer than competitors claim to. If you want more information about SocMetrics, you can contact them or follow them on Twitter.