Measuring Twitter Influence
What's the impact of a tweet? Well, it depends. Klout measures an individual's influence on Twitter to help you understand how many of your friends are taking your recommendations for new music, movies or restaurants seriously and clicking your shared links. For businesses, Klout provides insight into who you want to be talking to about your brand and spreading the word about your product.
To understand how influential a person is on Twitter, Klout first looks at a user's social graph. Calculating the size of a person's audience isn't as simple as looking at their follower count. The Klout engine calculates "True Reach". True Reach takes into account how active a user's network of followers actually is. If someone hasn't tweeted in 3 months it is unlikely they are being influenced by anyone they follow. Klout also evaluates how engaged a person's followers are. Have they ever @ mentioned or retweeted them? Do they have any common friends and do they talk about the same topics? True Reach allows Klout to go beyond the easily gamed follower count to understand the size of someone's real audience.
After Klout measures a person's True Reach, the engine analyzes the strength of their sphere of influence and calculates their overall Twitter impact. The Klout Score is a numerical representation of the size and strength of a person's sphere of influence on Twitter. The strength of influence is the likelihood that someone will listen or act upon any specific message and is measured by looking at interactions across the social graph. The scores range from 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence.
- Engagement
- How diverse is the group that @ messages you?
- Are you broadcasting or participating in conversation?
- Reach
- Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
- Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?
- Velocity
- How likely are you to be retweeted?
- Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?
- Demand
- How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?
- Are your follows often reciprocated?
- Network Strength
- How influential are the people who @ message you?
- How influential are the people that retweet you?
- Activity
- Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience?
- Are your tweets effective in generating new followers, retweets and @ replies?
The 25+ variables we use to answer these questions are normalized across the whole data set and run through our analytics engine. After the first pass of analytics we apply a specific weight to each data point. Then we run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final Klout Score.
Measuring a person's overall influence on Twitter is only half the battle. To fully understand the impact of a person's tweet about your business, you need to know what topics they are influential in. Klout takes every tweet and every link shared on Twitter and runs it through our semantic analysis engine to extract the relevant keywords out of those 140 characters. From that analysis, tags are generated and associated with the user. Klout looks at how often people use any specific tag, but more importantly, how many replies and retweets each tag generates. This allows Klout to calculate topic-specific scores.
Once you understand someone's True Reach, their overall influence, and the topics they are influential about, the final step is to understand who specifically they influence. Klout measures "Strength of Influence" between every relationship on a user's social graph. By understanding who a person influences or is influenced by, Klout can help you target your tweets and understand the viral channels in which your marketing message travels.
From print to radio, TV and the web, every broadcast medium has been measured. The individual is now a broadcaster and Klout measures the size of each person's audience and their ability to influence that audience.
We would love to hear your thoughts about measuring influence on Twitter in our forum.
