How to Find Online Influencers #brandwatchtips

Influencers. Highly trusted voices with a significant following and impact – like those we mentioned yesterday on our roundup of the most influential tweeters at Social Media Week London – can be a valuable asset to your business.

But how do you know someone’s an influencer? Do they have to be a public figure, a person everyone looks up to? Not necessarily.

What equals influence can be a matter of opinion. A less followed fan who tweets their love of your brand every day and has a strong influence in a niche community can be just as influential as a public figure.

Nevertheless, what’s the best way to identify your most influential brand advocates?

There are plenty of approaches worth considering, but this week, in a new episode of #brandwatchtips, we’ll be covering how to use social media monitoring to find online influencers.

Get started

To start identifying influencers you need to set up a channel/Query and then create a dashboard to be able to visualise your data.

To give you an example of how it can be done, we set up a Query capturing all mentions of social media monitoring over the last week.

Once you’ve opened the dashboard, the “Authors” tab is where you can find the most influential tweeters, bloggers and forum authors – in this example, they’re talking about SMM.

We have a variety of influencer metrics across different networks so you can spot those you consider influential.

This includes followers’ Kred score, number of tweets and our Impact score, which is a normalised number between 0-100 based on a combination of metrics, giving an overall score of how impactful an author or tweet has been.

Additionally, you have got the option to rank your influencers as you like, according to any of the metrics mentioned above.

Another useful feature is finding out more about your top brand advocates by looking at their Twitter profiles inside the app…

…and also connecting with them, by replying, retweeting or favouriting their mentions, a great way of approaching them and getting the ball rolling.

Influencer discovery is just one of the powerful uses of Brandwatch Analytics. Next week we will be taking you through how to find key topics about your brand.

Stay tuned!