September 18, 2013
There is no secret that social media is a crowded space. Given the high content saturation on most topics you can think of, how do you identify people (and therefore content) that really matter? I’d suggest this free tool will be very helpful in your search for genuine thought leaders on social. FollowerWonk (https://followerwonk.com/) started off as a Twitter analytics tool and was acquired by SEOMoz (Now Moz) a year ago. I find this tool easy to use, and recommend you try as well!
What is Social Authority?
Social Authority is a score of 1-100 that emphasises the importance of retweet rate, among other variables. The rationale behind this is simple – retweet rate indicates how well your content resonates on Twitter, unlike the number of followers. In other words, the more retweeted you are, the more likely you are a genuine influencer.
In Moz’s own words:
Social Authority is composed of:
– The retweet rate of users’ last few hundred tweets
– The recency of those tweets
– A retweet-based model trained on user profile data
How to measure Social Authority?
The process is quite simple. Simply connect your Twitter account with FollowerWonk, click ‘Analyse followers’ and indicate the account that you would like to focus on.
You can choose between analysing user’s followers or users they follow.
Once the report is done you will gain access to quite detailed statistics all of which can be really useful in your content strategy. You will be able to segment the users by geography, time of day they are most active, gender, number of followers, account age and so on. However, for the purpose of this blog post, let’s look at the Social Authority ranking:
As you can see, the social influence of my Twitter followers is rather limited (oh no!). It is nevertheless encouraging to see over a quarter of my followers having the authority score of 31 and above. There is still room for growth.
You can see the profiles of the most influential followers by clicking on the authority scores. You may discover that the higher end of influential followers is dominated by big organisations, in my case a clear example is Tesco (customer service channel, they had to follow me to DM about a wrong delivery… long story!). However, I find the best real life influencers live within the bracket of 40-70. These are individuals with high retweet rates, genuine thought leadership within their niche spheres of influence, but not necessarily celebrities with millions of followers (and therefore retweets).
How much does it cost?
The basic functionality of FollowerWonk is free. As you can see from the screenshot below, paid subscription unlocks even further functionality:
Of course, as any other tool, it has to be treated with caution. It is not impossible to manufacture retweets (as is the number of followers). From my experience true measurement relies on proactive diversification of tools and techniques. What matters, is using the right tools in the right time in conjunction with the right set of other tools. This will give you actionable insight, as opposed to mere information.
Have you tried FollowerWonk? Would you recommend it to your friend? Comment below!