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This is a guest blog post written by Ervin Strnisnik, Marketing Manager for PeerIndex.
When social media applications were first launched, people became obsessed by the number of friends they had; and brands bragged about who got more likes. But the penny has dropped – numbers are not what it’s all about. Now people are moving towards wanting quality rather than quantity. It is important to look at a wide variety of factors to decipher whether someone has a good online reputation; it is not judged merely by the number of Twitter followers they have. In the online world popularity does not equate to trust.
Online influence is measured so that people can know who to trust. It is calculated using online activity, taking topics, audience, and level of activity into account. How active people are on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is important. But what can really boost someone’s influence are good assessments from other people about their online activity. (When smart people engage with them in different ways, it basically means that smart people are saying they are worth engaging with).
It is these specific “opinion leaders” that are trusted by their online communities who need to be identified. A person’s online authority can be improved if after being targeted they are engaged with in the right way.
For business owners it is important to understand who influences their products and services, and to deal with these opinion leaders with authenticity and respect. Once the impact of a businesses’ influencer outreach is tracked and their authority measured, a business will know which connections to target to increase their own online reputation. Then the businesses need to make sure these “leaders” can experience their product and service – so they can then talk about it with authority.
According to McKinsey & Co, word-of-mouth is a factor behind between 20 and 50% of purchasing decisions – and the influential generate three times as many word-of-mouth messages as the non-influential.
"Word-of-mouth’s influence is greatest when consumers are buying a product for the first time or when products are relatively expensive, factors that tend to make people conduct more research, seek more opinions, and deliberate longer than they otherwise would. And its influence will probably grow: the digital revolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication.”
If a business tracks the people who have an impact on others and maintain a quality relationship with them, it will become more influential in turn. It’s all about managing connections. Associating with those who have a strong online influence means they can be referred or introduced to a niche community – a set of people who have the same values about, or interests in, products and services. These connections will give businesses access to people they may not have found otherwise; connections that are all spreading the word online.
4 Ways to Gain More Influence Online
1. Create content that really resonates with your audience. Focus matters. It is hard to be an expert in several subjects, so become known for the subject relevant to you.
2. Authentically increase the size of the community you are communicating with – the more people in your online community, the more likely that what you are saying will resonate with some of them.
3. Do not engage in mutual-follow-back schemes, rather let your reputation spread and let your audience grow organically. Be active; to drive resonance you must be constantly engaging with the people you want to be your audience.
4. Make sure you interact with the people who are retweeting you – if they are opinion leaders then they will talk about your product or service the more you engage with them. Take social media monitoring on board, this will allow you to monitor your brand and assess how influential specific bloggers or tweeters are.
Here at PeerIndex we calculate people’s online authority not just by the number of followers they have. We look at a variety of factors to measure online reputation. In our people ranking, a person can get a score of 0 to 100. This is calculated over 120 days of online activity, taking topics, audience, and activity into account. People can only get a score of over 90 if they are in the top 0.001% of the community. So there would only be 1 person with a score that high in a community of 1,000. These scores act as guidance so that in a hyper-connected world people may know who to trust.
When someone who is trusted in a particular field retweets something of yours or engages with you, this automatically means that you become more trustworthy. Their influence makes you more influential. Their expertise and the fact they have chosen to communicate with you sends the message that you are knowledgeable in this field, or worth following; basically that you have a good online reputation.
Image credit: iStockPhoto
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