How can you identify influencers in social media?
Influencer identification is an imperfect science at the moment, and it will likely continue to be for some time. Remember of course that influence is about the ability to get people to DO something. However, one way we can infer influence is to interpret reach and popularity as a signal of potential to influence.
If I wanted to identify a potential influencer, here’s how I’d do it:
- Search for the topic on Google or Alltop. Look at each informational source, follow the breadcrumbs to identify the author. Find that person everywhere on the web.
- Once the author has been identified, use sites like Klout, Kred and Peer Index to get a VERY GENERAL idea of how active they are across the social web. REMEMBER, these are EXTREMELY imperfect tools, but can provide a good high level view of how active an individual is, and how far their potential reach is.
- I’d Google the author and see what their web presence looks like.
- If the author seems to have a large and relatively engaged following, I’d count that person as a potential influencer.
- Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Influencer identification is a very manual process…sorry. But the only way to get a good idea of whether someone is the RIGHT kind of influencer is to do the work and scour the web looking at them.
You can also try using Traackr to identify additional influential individuals.