People whose shares, tweets, and likes can influence product sales can help your business. If you’re not familiar with how marketers seek out influencers to increase sales, you may wish to read Identifying Influencers, Increasing Sales first.
What can you do to identify influencers? One of the best tools out there is Klout, launched in 2008. Klout assigns social media users a score based on data points. It calculates by looking at everything from their job title on LinkedIn to how many Facebook friends they have. Klout’s head of communication, Lynn Fox, told Bloomberg Businessweek that they analyze 12 billion data points daily.
How have companies used Klout? Chevrolet, for example, gave people with high Klout scores three days with a Chevy Volt. The 50 influencers published 46,000 tweets and 20.7 MILLION blog posts. Most comments about the electric car were favorable.
In addition to Klout are tools such as Tellagence and Little Bird. They help marketers find social influencers by calculating who is most likely to persuade. Tellagence will find who is most inclined to tell their friends by studying metrics on retweets and how many exposures it takes to get a retweet. But that’s not all. Klout’s rivals are looking for social media users with fewer connections who have the ability to move sales through their comments. (It’s not all about the numbers; quality counts.)
Little Bird charges $250-$2,500 monthly. Tellagence starts at $500/month per community. When you consider that only 30% of brands consider themselves to be effective or extremely effective at connecting social media to revenue – the ROI must be in there. One search with one of these tools could save you countless hours. What’s your time worth?
Have you tried influence marketing? Are you on Klout? We’d love to hear your experience. Please share in the comments below.