How to Attain and Measure Your Most Valuable Marketing Assets

**SIDENOTE: Don’t forget to check out today’s new Advent Calendar gift on the sidebar! FYI: Nora Richardson–branding expert, graphic designer, and owner of Spot-On Branding–is featured in today’s gift.

Finding your key influencers and ranking your own influence online isn’t as difficult as you may think. With the right online-influencer tools, you’ll be able to track down your key influencers, engage them with your online content, and get them talking even more about your industry or brand.

See below for three of the top influencer-rating tools:

Klout: The purpose of Klout is to measure an individual’s influence through observing content these individuals create online. For those of you who may not be aware, online content ranges everywhere from a tweet to a Facebook post, and a LinkedIn status update to a video on YouTube. Specifically, Klout measures the amount of influence a person has on others, whom a person influences, and the topics that person is considered influential on.

Klout makes measurements on several areas of your social sphere including the content you create, how people interact with your content, and the makeup and size of your social sphere—among other data. Klout then ranks your influence from these measurements and breaks your influence down into three main sections: True Reach, Amplification Score, and Network Score.

You can search Klout for specific topics and hashtags to find key influencers in areas of your industry.

Below is an example of one of our client’s Klout (Sandy Salle, CEO of Hills of Africa):

PeerIndex: Similar to Klout, PeerIndex analyzes data from individuals’ social graphs and then categorizes, ranks, and scores these influencers. PeerIndex focuses on an individual’s “authority finger-print,” which is an analysis of that person’s authority online. This finger-print is created from eight variables that take into account a person’s topic resonance, audience impact, and activity, among other data, to outline an individual’s authority on a specific topic.

Below is an example of one of our client’s PeerIndex analysis (Natalie Bradley, owner of Bride Attraction):

TweetLevel: Although TweetLevel is still in Beta, we believe it is a highly effective tool for measuring and ranking influence on Twitter. TweetLevel’s algorithm is comprised of a variety of variables:

• Following: the number of people you follow.
• Followers: the number of people following you.
• Updates: how often you post on your Twitter page.
• Name Pointing: how many people use the “@YourTwitterName” to refer to you.
• Retweets: how many people have retweeted your post.
• Twinfluence Rank: Twinfluence is separate from TweetLevel and uses APIs for measuring influence.
• Twitter Grader: another separate tool that adds additional input into TweetLevel’s indexing of your Twitter account.
• Involvement Index: a score that is calculated to illustrate how you interact among your Twitter community.
• Velocity Index: keeps track of your participation on Twitter to ensure that you’re active.

These variables are then combined to create an overall Twitter score.

Do you use any of these online tools to track and find your influencers? If so, which tool do you find to be the most useful?