Does Twitter Follower Count Matter?
I won’t even try to act cool, I get excited every time I get that email from Twitter letting me know that I have a new follower. I have even bragged to my friends about my massive (ha!) 400+ follower count. The notion that random strangers find my musings interesting enough to subscribe to my updates can be intoxicating.
The dirty little secret of Twitter though is once a person follows more than several hundred people their tweet stream turns into a waterfall. Not that I don’t appreciate every follower that I have but when I click through and see that they are following more than 1,000 users I know that it is unlikely that my tweets are even seen let alone have any impact on them. Should these people count as followers? What if they have no intention of reading your tweets and are following you for the simple purpose of getting return follows? Everyone on Twitter has experienced the spam follower and the abandoned accounts, should these people count as followers? An industry has even popped up around buying Twitter followers.
We believe you have to go far deeper than simply looking at follower count to understand how influential a person is on Twitter. Follower count is valuable in giving you a starting point to understand a person’s possible reach but doesn’t give you a sense of how shallow or deep their influence is with that audience. When I step back and look at my own 400 followers I can only truthful say my tweets impact 75-100 of them. So if you only had 150 followers but all 150 where actually engaged in your updates wouldn’t you actually be more influential than I am even though I have more followers?
Like I said before, I would take more followers any day (you can find me at @joefernandez) but measuring influence is about more than just tickling the ego. Follower count is only a very small piece of the puzzle and we predict it will actually become less important as more people join Twitter and everyone’s social graph rides the boom. If you want to be influential, build deep connections and don’t worry about your follower count.
Aung and Rich presenting Klout at the Unconference in Singapore.
Klout tags - Is there meaning behind those 140 characters?
At Klout we’ve always felt that measuring a person’s influence was only meaningful if you could understand what specifically a person was influential about. To achieve this we run every tweet and every link shared in those tweets through our semantic analysis to abstract out what people are talking about. The by-product of this analysis are tags we associate to your account and save in our database. If you look at your content page you can see the ten tags that you have used the most according to our engine. We feel that this is much more powerful than just tracking keywords that are often used because it allows us to build a taxonomy of authority.
In the coming months we will begin introducing our topic based K-Scores that utilize the semantic tags we are generating from tweets. You can begin to get a preview of what user has been assigned any specific tag the most by clicking the tag name. This tag rank page is a new feature that allows you to explore who tweets the most about any specific topic. This is a great way to discover new people to follow who share similar interest with you!
Measuring influence is about more than boosting your ego
If you’ve found your way to this blog post then I probably don’t have to sell you on the idea that social media is fundamentally changing the way businesses market themselves and connect with customers. Here’s the thing: they aren’t doing this just because it’s the cool new thing. One of the biggest reasons companies are adopting social media is because they’ve learned that people trust their friends more than “A-list” bloggers or other forms of advertising. These companies are looking to leverage your influence to help spread the word about their company or product.
Consulting firms like Razorfish even say influence “is a driving force that affects everything we do as an agency, and, as we’re impressing upon our clients, it matters more than ever in this economic downturn as consumers across the country are losing faith in large institutions and experts and instead are turning to each other for advice”.
Even Harvard Business Review says that “online connections might be strategically targeted so as to take advantage of their influence on one another”. Think about this for a second, your ability to influence others through social media is becoming a core marketing strategy for many businesses.
Influence has become the currency of social media. While companies might not cut a check in exchange for your influence (you would probably instantly become less influential if they did), in this world of “user-generated marketing” there is real value in being influential. Companies will often establish focus groups around influencers where their opinions directly shapes what products are created and how they are sold. Influencers often are invited to special events, given product samples and can (and should) be treated like royalty by companies.
Some people use influence measurement tools like Klout for the simple gratification that they are using Twitter correctly. Others are just looking to have their ego stroked (we all need it sometimes). The truth though is that the individual is now a broadcaster and is being monetized by businesses. There is power in understanding how you are viewed by companies and the public at large. The best part about being an influencer isn’t being hooked up by companies because you helped spread the word for them, it’s being able to spread your own ideas and knowing that with a simple tweet you can have almost any question answered or door opened. If you dig into the data provided by Klout you can maximize your ability to do that.
4 ways to use Klout to find amazing new people to follow
Before we officially launched Klout I thought I had curated the most amazing group of Twitter users to follow the world had ever seen. Using Klout for the last couple of months I’ve realized that the Twitterverse is way bigger and more interesting than I could have ever imagined. Though Klout was not designed specifically for finding new people to follow, here are a four ways I have used Klout to make the list of people I follow infinitely more amazing.
1. Check out who influences the people who influence you.
Charlie O’Donnell (@ceonyc) is one of the people Klout names as an influencer of me. By clicking on his profile image from my Klout profile summary page I am able to then see who influences Charlie. From here I discovered great people like @kmaverick and @jdrive. It kind of feels like working my way up the tree of knowledge.
* Note - You may have to tweet out who influences you to unlock the ability to see other people’s profile by clicking on them.
2. Who else influences the people you influence?
Klout says that I am influencer of my co-founder @binhtran. By clicking through to his profile I can see who else influences him. From here I have found some great people to follow and have learned more about @binhtran. Seeing what other influencers you are grouped with in the mind of your follower is a unique way to find cool new people.
3. Retweeters of your favorite tweets
When clicking across people’s profiles one of my favorite things to check out is the content tab to see which of their tweets where retweeted the furthest across Twitter. Often I’ll see a retweet that strikes me as something I surely would have retweeted. By looking at the other users who retweeted that message I’ve been able to find users that share my very specific interests to follow.
4. Discover who tweets the most about any term
This is brand new functionality we just rolled out last week and is probably the coolest way to discover people to follow. When you are on anyone’s “content” page you’ll notice a list of tags. These tags are generated by running all the links shared and tweets created by the people Klout monitors through our semantic analysis. The semantic analysis allows us to abstract out whether or not there is any meaning behind those 140 characters. You can click on the tags you see on anyone’s content page to see who has used that tag the most. I was able to use this functionality to find other people tweeting about Downtown Los Angeles, where our office is.
My hope is that Klout is as helpful in your search for finding the perfect people to follow as it has been for me. We would love to hear about any other ways you’ve used Klout as a discover tool!
Hot new Klout features - Part I
For most of the past three months the Klout team has been hard at work behind the scenes. We’ve been building a platform that monitors millions of Twitter users and evaluates each person’s overall influence. We go beyond overall influence though and look at the strength of influence between every connection on the social graph. We want to understand whether a person’s influence is wide and shallow or runs deep with a core group of people. We then look at every tweet and every link shared and run it through our semantic analysis to see if we can abstract out any meaning behind those 140 charecters to begin understanding what topics someone is influential about.
Most of this work has happened behind the scenes and while we’ve been making great strides in our ability to process more data in less time with increased accuracy, our site is looking pretty stale. It is with great pride that we release our first big change to the Klout website.
The first thing you’ll probably notice is that instead of two main navigation tabs (summary and detail) you now have four. Summary is still the same, but we decided to break the detail tab into “stats” and “content” and add a new “network” tab.
The stats tab now displays the six categories used to calculate a person’s K-score. Each category contains a number of variables that are measured versus the entire Klout population. For each variable we provide analysis about how you rank versus everyone else. If you are interested in trying to raise your influence this is a good way to gain insight into how you are using Twitter.
The content tab shows the tags that are generated by our semantic analysis of the users tweets and links. Click on the tags to find out who uses that tag the most. From the content tab you can also see which of the users tweets were retweeted the most and what links they have shared.
The network tab is a geography based visualization of the users influence. By measuring the influence between each connection on the social graph we can tell you what cities you are most influential in. This map is just a starting point but if you were going to visit a new city and wanted to know which one of your friends had a lot of “Klout” there and could hook you up, it could be very helpful!
As the title of the post indicates, this is just part I. Over the next couple weeks we will be releasing a series of new features that will help serve as your personal publishing analytics tool box. Knowing that there are more exciting features you could build with this data then we could ever possibly get to we are thrilled to also be releasing our public API!
Developers can now visit api.klout.net and start adding influence to their apps. Most the data used on the site is available through the API. The rate limit is relatively low but just shoot us an email and we would be happy to work with you to raise it.
Enjoy!
How do you get the word out about your company or product?
One of the inspirations that led us to build Klout was the frustration of having sat in dozens of marketing meetings talking about how “we just need to make this go viral”. Often the next line I would hear as I was slamming my head towards the desk was “we’ll just get it on Techcrunch”.
Almost every marketing department has a list of key influencers in their segment. In the startup technology world people like Michael Arrington or Robert Scoble come to mind. The challenge though is going beyond those obvious influencers to find the hidden gems that can champion your cause.
With rise of user generated content and social media it is easier than ever for individuals to share their opinion about your company or spread your message. I can instantly tweet out a message about a cool new site I found and the people who listen and trust me the most, the ones I influence, are going to consume that message and start forming an opinion or generating interest.
We’ve actually been able to verify this cycle during the launch of Klout. One of the most popular features on the site is our list of people who either influence you or are influenced by you. We’ve kept careful records of who mentions Klout in any tweet. After each tweet about Klout we look at who signs up for an account. Almost without fail the people we say are influenced by the person who just tweeted about Klout will sign up for an account.
We are excited about the data we are generating here at Klout and how it might help companies find the army of influencers that are right for them. The world is starting to wake up and realize that you can’t just “take the product viral”. If you have the analytics to tell you were to plant the seeds you can at least give your message the proper chance to grow and spread. Node optimization is the name of the game.
How do you currently get the word out about your company or product? Would this process change if you could specifically target key influencers at the topic or vertical level?
Is ExecTweets a Slap in the Face to Twitter App Developers?
Today Federated Media launched ExecTweets, a place where tweets from top executives across several industries are aggregated with hopes of highlighting the top content. It’s pretty clear this isn’t just another twitter app however. First there is the fact that Twitter apparently is in a partnership with Federated Media. ExecTweets has been given prime advertising real estate on the twitter landing page under the profile information. I know a lot of app developers (including us) who would kill for this opportunity. I am also guessing that Federated Media is not subject to the strict rate limiting rules that Twitter imposes on the rest of their developers.
I love Twitter as an app and as a development platform but it’s interesting to notice that they have not recieved near the backlash that Facebook did when they played favorites at the expensive of their developers. Is this because the rest of the Twitter development community and media at large as even more in love with Twitter than I am? I like to think that much the same way that Twitter seems to be a totally different company than Facebook that their developers platform would evolve differently but now I am worried.
Looking at Twitters blog they do a nice job at highlighting intersting apps that are built on top of their API. The new Twitter oath roll out is exciting for developers and the information from this should allow Twitter to create a catalogue of Apps. As a company aggressively developing on the Twitter platform though I just hope they do their best to keep an even playing field.
Do You Want to Be a Klout “Super” User?
Over the last couple weeks we have slowly been rolling out some new Klout functionality. Many of you may have noticed that you now have the ability to “compare” users. You can do this by clicking the “compare” tab in the top left corner next to search.
Another feature we have added is we now allow users to search across the nearly 1 million indexed profiles in Klout. Previously users were only able to see their own profile but now you can click on your influencers and finally see their K-Score and who influences them. This is a great way to discover new people to follow!
If you have a Klout account but do not see this “super” user functionality it is really easy to get. Just tweet out your score or who influences you by using the “Tweet This” button and your account will automatically be upgraded.
We would love to hear what you think about these new features.
The Startup Pitch Contest - Lessons Learned
This past Monday Klout was one of 16 finalist chosen to present their company as finalist in the SXSW Acclerator Showcase. The format was simple, companies were broken into 4 categories and given 2 minutes to present and then 10 minutes of questions. One company from each category would be chosen as the winner.
Two minutes to present your company is not a lot of time. It’s like asking a parent to tell you everything amazing about their baby and then cutting them off once they are just getting started. After a bunch of practicing we finally got a presentation together that highlighted our top features in less than two minutes. This is where we screwed up.
It’s not about features. It wasn’t just us who fell into this trap. Company after company got on stage and talked about all the cool stuff you could do on their website. Half through the day one of the judges, Guy Kawasaki, said “maybe this format is wrong” expecting him to say we should have more time to talk I got excited. “Two minutes is too long,” Guy continued, “I want to know what this product does in 10 seconds”.
All that really matters is that your software is solving a real pain point for some person (or better yet, a huge market). Get this point across first and make sure you drive it home. If they connect to that they will ask questions and you will get all the time in the world to talk about your amazing features.
← Previous Next→
