Finding Influencers Using Your Own Algorithm

Awareness has added an interesting feature to its social media management solution with a new release this week. It’s essentially an influencer scoring and ranking functionality that allows you to set parameters or point values for a person’s action (Tweet, Retweet, Like, etc.) then score how they react or interact with your brand or content.

Scoring can be time dependent (more points if they’ve re-tweeted you in the last 14 days), geographic in nature (more points if they’re closer to you physically) and certainly reach/impact in nature (more points assigned to actions by those with higher follower counts, etc.).

What this allows marketers to do is automatically pull in fan and follower data, including specific information found in their social profiles, and grade how often or well they interact with or amplify your brand’s content. Unlike voluntary influencer programs like SocialToaster, GaggleAmp or Brandsforce, Awareness’s functionality scores anyone you’ve connected with socially. While you can certainly get deeper analytics from those voluntarily using your influencer tool, the Awareness approach has better reach and is potentially more useful in identifying passive influencers who might like your brand.

It’s kind of a CRM system meets influencer scoring to create your own internal Klout score for your audience members.

You can even use your monitoring streams within the Awareness Social Hub platform to cast a net and score influencers in a given topic without having a direct connection to them on the social grid. It’s an interesting new addition to the SMMS space and gives an already robust and powerful platform another highlight to attract new customers.

Another thing I like about this type of functionality is that you control the parameters. You’re not depending upon a Klout score or some other index whose algorithm you don’t even understand. It fits your needs. And that’s the truest form of influencer measure — that which is relevant to you and your brand.

Hat’s off to Awareness for adding the feature. Have you seen something similar elsewhere? How quickly will this piece of the SMMS pie be replicated in other tools? Or perhaps more meaty a topic to discuss, what parameters would you pick as the most important in determining influencers for your company? The comments, as always, are yours.