Measuring Your Social Influence

There are so many social network outlets nowadays, how do we know what percentage of the social media pie we are influencing?

There have been attempts at measuring individual platforms but I have not yet found an umbrella measurement tool that actively incorporates measurement of activity from the established big 4 (twitter, facebook, myspace, and youtube) along with emerging social media platform activity (actively indexing these new platforms).

The need that I've noticed lives with entrepreneurs who use social networks as a free and easily shareable marketing solution that is managed usually by someone who doesn't have time to directly segment and report on the highest value social networks from which their customers are being referred. It is not only tedious, but inept comparatively, because each platform has a different "influence" and "value" yard stick.

And also the algorithm is tricky to build. I've given some thought to what the social influence tracker should account for, and here are some of my thoughts.

Should it be adaptable to say the medium of your choice? If you're actively engaged in twitter but are only an observer on facebook, but your social influence calculator is showing that you have more fans and friends on facebook than you have followers on twitter, should the algorithm point out this imbalance in your social media concentration?

Emerging networks. Can this tracker follow upswings in usage of your brand name of social networks that you are not currently on? Let's say you have not claimed your business in foursquare, and that you don't even know what foursquare is, but last week a user created a listing for you and now there are 100 unique check ins. Your tracker should constantly be patrolling new social networks for your brand name and alert you when you are not active on a social network that your name is emerging on. It should also gauge how relevant this new network is for you. Is this new network relevant to the other networks that you are actively engaged in? If it's random, the algorithm should send you an alert but not suggest you be on it.

Your Second Life. How often are the "things" (links, pictures, blog article, status updates) interacted with by your friends/fans/followers? Who are your most loyal users? Are there any multichannel users who are interacting with you from multiple networks? The social media measuring tool should have some way of counting how many "generations" your content has gone through, and be able to segment out the attributes of content that is most shared, and likewise, the attributes of the social network users who are most likely to share.

Smart Keyword Lists. Let's face it. Keywords are the primary key to getting your information out there. If you're using high volume keywords in your content you are likely to be searched up in these social networks. Wouldn't it be fantastic if this social media measurement tool could "suggest" to you on a daily basis what keywords in your industry are "buzzing" right now based on Google Trends, Google External Keyword Research tool

Strategy Suggestions: One step further to leverage the smart keyword lists is for this tool to suggest content that you could be building on, new content that seems relevant to your brand's mission statement, and could recommend the social networks that you should seed your content on?

There's a lot to chew here, and I believe there's an emerging idea for an uber platform that could tell you your social influence in a flash. Illustrate your opportunity versus your current visibility. It's like a mashup of SEO strategies with Analytics analysis tactics, layered onto the Social Media networks.

If this tool were built, what would you like to see as a feature?

-Cindy