How To Manage Your Online Influence

guest post by Andy Havard

Whether you're an Internet marketer, a blogger or an online socialite, the influence you have over your friends, followers and the influence you have within your niche is essential to how you operate on the web. It's very difficult to build brand awareness, improve website traffic or generate higher numbers of Subscribers and Friends if your social media presence goes completely unnoticed.

With social media campaigns becoming an essential staple in the everyday web browsing experience of the online user, it's quickly becoming the most powerful way to influence an audience.

So, how do you manage your online influence? How do you monitor the impact you're having over your Friends, Followers and Connections? How do you know you're becoming a true thought leader in your niche? The following article aims to tackle those three important questions.

Free Monitoring Solutions

The power of online influence is not a concept reserved for the corporate elite. In fact it's perhaps the only Internet practice out there that can be applied universally for any strategy, regardless of its agenda. The idea of influence is universal on and off the net, and the notion of influence is probably the most powerful tool out there. With that being the case it's unsurprising that there are some fantastic free sites out there for you to use to measure, and monitor your influential impact on the social medias of the World Wide Web.

Let's take a look at two particularly great examples:

• Facebook Insight

Facebook Insight has one slight downfall in that it is as an analytics tool reserved for users with Facebook 'Pages'. Although in today's media age everybody with a hobby or a profession has Facebook Page. When I say everybody I mean everybody; musicians, brands, businesses, photographers, writers, bloggers, animators, cinematographers, celebrities, everyone who's anyone has a Facebook Page.

The great thing about Facebook Insight is the new level of detail Facebooks updates have given it as an analytical tool. Before the new updates Insight could only measure Likes, Unlikes and general audience statistics such as age, gender and location, which in essence was actually rather great. However, Facebook has now woke up to the real power of online influence and introduced the new 'talking about this' analytic. This new analytical tool monitors how many users are talking about your Page, product, video, music etc. This has been made possible because Facebook now targets specific keywords and phrases. Long gone are the days of Tagging to get Facebook to register mentions of your brand or blog.

Today all you need to do is type the name of a Page and Facebook will register it. Sure there’s room for this to flag up some errors, but they will be few and far in between. Overall this will be a great way to track the power of word of mouth influence on this particular social media platform.

• Klout

Klout is a rapidly growing data analytical tool. It may still be in its BETA stage, but it's certainly becoming very popular with online users due to its presentation of easy to digest information. It tackles the idea of online influence in a way anyone can understand. It's a fantastic way to monitor the collective power of your combined social media website presence.

It may lack a lot of essential facts and figures, but it provides an easily accessible summary of your online influence. For instance it provides a Klout Ranking, it gives you a Klout Style, and it also determines what Topics/Niches you are an influencer of. These types of data help to inform you on whether your social media strategies are improving or failing. What is especially nice about this data is that it provides you with a standing in your Topic area, and lets you know who the top influences are for you to compete with.

The fact it displays figures and statuses gives you real tangible targets to aim for and improve on. It's certainly a great tool for providing a social media overview, which will no doubt spark a great deal of health competition.

Paid Monitoring Solutions

As always with analytics and data there are always going to be monitoring solutions that cost a few of your hard earned pennies. So let's check out what a couple of these tools have to offer:

• Hoot Suite

Hoot Suite is a firm favourite of the online world. It presents data in an easy to analyse format (much like Facebook Insight), but provides reports for a whole host of your social medias. Think of it as the 'real data' to support your Klout analytics. You can personalize reports, which makes collecting information about your online influence an utter breeze, and you can even have those reports sent to you whenever you like.

The only downside to Hoot Suite is that you have to run a lot of your social media activity through the platform itself in order to reap its benefits, which can sometimes be a little convoluted compared to just logging on to Twitter to fire off a Tweet. Although, arguably the exceptional data it provides when you use the tool is more than worth the slight inconvenience it causes you.

• Follower Wonk

Follower Wonk is more than just a whacky name. It works on a credit system, which will cost you some time and effort as well as a few pennies.  The data it provides has been an area of much debate of late, and so has its singular Twitter focus. It provides some great information for expanding your online influence by allowing you to find a whole host of Twitter users in any niche. It can act almost like a search engine for finding Twitter users for any topic, and gives you insights into their Tweets, Followers and profile activity.

Your 'Wonk' data can even inform you how active users are, helping you to weed out spammers, and allow you to target big socialites. You can also analyse your Twitter performance against huge social media players, and monitor your growth as your social media strategies get implemented onto the web.

This particular tool is really a device to help you check your Twitter standing amongst your competitors, and against the users you aspire to have the same presence as. As you can see it’s also a fantastic way to find and target thought leaders, industry players and audiences you’ve yet to connect with.

Summary

The power of having a formidable online presence and a strong social media influence in your niche (or on the entire Internet for that matter) is perhaps the biggest benefit any business, brand or blogger can have. The only way to reach such online heights is through careful monitoring and measuring using an array of tools and software. By checking your status in the social media ranks you can carefully plan new strategies, highlight goals and targets, and have a firm grasp on real, tangible data that you can track for all sorts of marketing purposes to further and improve your social media approaches.

About The Author

Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.