Measuring influence on Twitter has never really been that easy, and tools such as KLOUT were always a bit hit and miss, plus they never told us much about how they did it – and Klout could be gamed. Earlier this year, after a fairly long lived life, Klout (which measured all your social media influence) died… bye Klout.
Recently, founder of MOZ (the SEO Tools platform) and author, Rand Fishkin moved to start up a new company called SPARKTORO. I’ve watched as the team has built out the website and talked about the project – its mission is to make it easier to discover the websites, blogs, podcasts, social accounts, and publications that reach your audience. The larger project is incomplete but the first tool available from SPARKTORO is SparkScore.
Measuring Influence With SparkScore – The Idea
In his blog introducing SparkScore Rand discusses why simple comparisons measurements are truly useless, measurements such as follower counts. His example of his account having 5.7x followers than his wifes but not always having that amount of interaction is a great example.
The same examples play about again and again when it comes to any industry, and influencer you look at. Take a look at anyone with a large following, or even a moderate following and the interaction rate will reduce – its often a case of more bots or dead accounts (expected) but the reality is also you dont always tweet when people are online and you dont always tweet what people will interact with and finally you are one of maybe thousands of accounts people follow so why should you be the tweet they interact with! you should be so lucky!
SparkScore works by comparing you to similar accounts, it works by measuring multiple metrics (and not your follower count), thinks like engagement metrics, retweets, likes, list counts etc – ok I am sure this can be gamed because those metrics are so open – but Rand I am sure won’t have told us every metric they are measuring.
Rand admits this isn’t a fully fledged product with the paid version 9 to 12 months away, but each day you get 25 free user searches to check on influence (remember its relative to that person and account not every other person, which makes it much better than Klout). So give it a try.
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