Knowing your influencers is a key goal for most companies. However, there is no straight forward formula, or right or wrong way to identify these evangelists. Repeated engagements and metrics such as Klout will help in assessing how engaged and how influential they are in their own merit, but without putting in a lot of manual work, engagements and Klout won’t allow brands to easily spot their influencers. Brands won’t be able to spot trends in the content being shared, where influencers are located, what else they are interested in, and how often they really engage with the content.
Cue link listening. Link Listening is a functionality found in SpiderQube Twitter, Twitter’s listening platform, allowing its users to listen in real-time to ongoing conversations.
Link listening allows users of the platform to listen to tweets which contain a link from a specific site, (say, immediatefuture.co.uk) or even from a particular page (like immediatfuture.co.uk/blog/).
It does this by using a clever Twitter search query that looks for all tweets containing that link. You may say you can easily do that yourself from inputting that link in the Twitter search bar yourself, but what this platform does for you is categorises those sharing this link in multiple, very useful groups.
Why is this helpful?
When analysing who is sharing a specific link, SpiderQube will spot trends and split the audience by gender, age group, location and also other content they share. With this information readily at hand, brands will be able to find their overall brand evangelists and also pocket of specific influencers – their “micro-communities” of content sharers.
Having access to all of this information will present brands with the opportunity to create content specifically for influencers, send special messages to their micro-communities and grow and harness this community further. Content or promotion customisation will become an easy feat, for example knowing what else these users like allows brands to ensure incentives are targeted to their users. If, for example, a pocket of influencers was also particularly interested in technology products, a giveaway promotion could be one of the latest tech gadgets.
Traffic back to the site, Klout, and overall engagements will only go so far to identifying influencers. But being able to identify, with key measurable data, who influencers are gives brands a whole new level of engagement and content opportunities and build a loyal fan-base going forward.
I’ll have to check out SpiderQube, have to say though Twitter Analytics already has this baked in for your own site (if you remembered to install Twitter Cards).
And setting up your own search columns around other sites you’re interested in – is already pretty killer – and for the big boys refining further based on how many replies/retweets/favourites and of those tweets received is quite easy too.