FreshNetworks Blog

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Social Media Influence conference in London on a panel discussion how to measure influence in social media.

It’s a tricky subject and people tend to fall int two camps:

1. People who are looking to define and then develop a set of quantitative metrics that can be used to measure influence. I’ve seen the simple (building on page impressions) to the complex (with algorithms and calculations that I’m not convinced always make sense).
2. People who try to measure softer factors such as the influence that somebody plays and then mapping this against the contributions they make online

I think that both of these methods are great ways of exploring what it means to contribute to social media. But in terms of real influence, I think other factors are as important. In fact, all of these methods look at input measures - the amount of content somebody provides, the number of people who reads this, the number of contacts or connections they have. Perhaps a better way to measure influence would be output measures - finding a way to identify and measure the impact that somebody has rather than the effort they put in.

My thoughts on this are fairly early at the moment, but we’re starting to gather data at FreshNetworks from our online communities that might help to explore and develop output measures of influence.

In the meantime, you can see the panel session I was part of below (there are two videos to view).

Some more reading

• Why Social Media Is Like Distance Running
• Cultural Voyeurism and Social Media
• The Art of Conversation - It’s About Listening Not Marketing
• 10 immutable laws for measuring conversation
• Mastering Social Media