Analytics, Listening, and Influencers in Social Media

I learned a lot of stuff last week at Social Media Week – 2013. And, I saw some cool tools demoed. Today, I’d like to talk about a tool to identify influencers in social media — Traackr.

Now, I know we’ve all heard of Trackur — which is a general listening tool that monitors your online reputation, tracks sentiment, and finds influencers in social media.

Traackr — ONLY identifies influencers across a range of social media.While Trackur scans social networks for conversations about your brand and identifies influencers who are behind these conversations, Traackr specifically identifies social network users mentioning keywords related to your product or brand. Once identified, Traackr, rates PEOPLE (not businesses or online news outlets like Huffington Post and Mashable) identified based on reach (size of audience), resonance (ability of the influencer to generate action in social media, such as a comment or share), relevance (relationship to your keywords), and recency.

Discover and engage with influencers in social media

So, Traackr goes beyond just listening in social media to truly identify influencers who are involved in conversations related to your brand. Each influencer is then given a score based on reach, resonance, relevance, and recency and rank ordered — the higher the infuencer scores, the higher they are on the list.

Traacker goes beyond just finding influencers in social media and ranking them, however. Traackr generates a user profile for each influencer and identifies your “share of voice” or the mentions of your brand relative to competitor brands.

While Traackr doesn’t allow Boolean logic in your keyword searches (and, or) it does allow you to exclude keywords and use geolocation to limit results to local or specific regions.

One thing we know about influencers in social media is they might not have the vast networks of celebrities like Beyonce and Justin Beiber, but they often exert MORE influence over followers. This is a phenomenon known as microfame and it comes from the respect they engender among their followers.

Once you’ve identified influencers in social media like Quora, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, the next task is to engage influencers.

Tactics to engage influencers in social media

1. Special offers

Influencers have a great ability to impact sales — or exert influence. So, you might want to give them some incentives to spread your message to their networks. Offer them a free product to make it easy for them to review on their blog or on Facebook. If you’re a restaurant, invite them to a free meal. In their own way, influencers are more powerful than celebrities and are gaining more influence than more traditional media.

2. Involve them with your brand

Allowing your social media influencers input in your brand increases their involvement with your brand. It also heightens their stake in your success.  Give influencers a voice and they’ll go to the wall to help make you successful.

3. Reward their efforts

It goes a long way to simply thank influencers for their support of your brand.

Analytics

Traackr doesn’t produce much in the way of analytics. It focuses on providing profiles of influencers and their activity based on your keywords. Even standard sentiment analysis is really a manual process. Of course, many social media strategies, including me, don’t put much stock in sentiment analysis, preferring more nuanced measures of reputation.

Benefits/ Drawbacks of Traackr

I’m just geeky enough that I really like the features and detailed information you get about influencers in social media. Of course, all these features come at a high cost — $1500/ month. Which is a lot more than most of my clients can afford. That’s why I prefer using Trackur. It helps identify influencers in social media+ supports some great graphical analysis that help you judge your social media at a glance.