When managing multiple social media accounts, it can sometimes become difficult to judge how influential these accounts are and whether your messages are reaching the right audiences.
However, there are a number of websites that you can use to gauge your performance and measure whether or not your topics are hitting the right notes with your fans. We’ve listed three of the sites that we particularly rate here at Tinderbox Media below.
1. Klout
Klout is an effective tool to measure your online influence. The site demonstrates the topics that are most prominent, how far your messages spread and how many of your followers are within your network. You can also create lists to add to your network and see very clearly how many times you have been retweeted or mentioned. Similarly, once you have determined your Klout score, it is easy to see the increase or decrease in your online performance over time. A decrease in your score will motivate you to push for a higher Klout ranking and ultimately, increase your online presence. In order to achieve a high Klout ranking, you need to interact with your network and tweet as much as possible.
As with all social capital sites, it’s important to use Klout as a rough guide because your score can easily be influenced by the amount that you tweet and Klout doesn’t always measure whether or not your tweets are relevant to your influential topics. Therefore, some people who tweet a lot about their personal life can be seen to be very influential on Klout when actually their content is not related to their topics.
2. PeerIndex
PeerIndex is great for measuring how influential you are across a range of different topics on social networks. The site measures your profile against eight categories, including business, arts and media, technology, science, sports, health, news and politics and leisure and lifestyle. PeerIndex maps out the areas where you a performing best and measures your authority, activity and audience to give a comprehensive overview of the areas where you need to improve in order to increase your score. The site also enables you to compare your performance against your network so that you can see who is the most influential and the areas that your network excels in. PeerIndex is arguably the most reliable social capital comparison website as it updates regularly and clearly demonstrates how you can improve your social performance.
3. Kred
New to the social capital site scene, Kred is a brand new way of measuring your online presence. Very different to Klout and PeerIndex, Kred awards points every time you are retweeted or mentioned, so you can see exactly where your online strengths lie and how your score is determined. Unlike the other sites, Kred also has an interesting feature that allows you to put your offline Kred online. You can upload documents detailing your achievements, which are then added to your online Kred profile. This further enables you to see your level of influence and outreach and your most prominent topic, which in turn should encourage others to award you ‘Global Kred’.
These three sites are an effective tool for comparing your social presence against your network and can all be very useful if you have lost momentum with your Twitter and Facebook pages. All can motivate you to work harder to increase your online presence as each provides you with a visual representation of how your influence is progressing. Klout, PeerIndex and Kred also function as an effective hub to link all of your networking sites together and measure your online presence in one place.
So why not measure the effectiveness of your online campaign using Klout, PeerIndex or Kred, today? Let us know which you prefer and why – and if you know of any others, please let us know about them.
Charlotte Pittock-Holdsworth is a second year Public Relations with Marketing student at Leeds Metropolitan University. The founder of Social Relations, a social media agency based in Leeds, Charlotte handles social media accounts for independent clients and conducts white label work for digital agencies. She is currently applying for her placement year, which will commence in July 2012.
You can follow Charlotte on Twitter here.
