Measuring your influence on social media may not tell the full story, expert warns

Businesses using social media tools in order to track their efficiency should only use them as a secondary tool and never rely on them to deliver accurate information, a social marketing expert has warned.

But SMEs have also been warned to continue their social media campaigns in order to reach new audiences.

Social media expert Con Frantzeskos says businesses using tools such as Buzzom, TwitterScore and TwitterGrader in order to monitor their performance on Twitter need to be very careful they don’t place the success of their strategy on third-party applications.

“The question that has to be asked is, is why do people use them? What do they hope to gain out of those tools? What are you finding?”

“I’ve never used them for anything other than a bit of a gimmick search, because I don’t think they’re useful when used outside of a certain context. If you’re using these tools to figure out how to go about using social media, I think they’re pretty superficial.”

Many of these tools are used to track an account’s “influence” by measuring the amount of messages “re-tweeted” by users. A recent article from PCWorld highlighted five of the most popular programs.

Popular analytics tool Buzzom uses this method, along with a combination of graphs and charts depicting top mobile matches, along with an “influence” meter, calculated using the ratio of your followers to the number of accounts you are following yourself.

Another tool, Twinfluence, uses similar equations to determine “velocity”, “social capital” and “centralisation”. The social capital tool measures how influential your followers are, with centralisation measuring how much of your influence is invested in a small group of users.

The Twittergrader tool works similarly, with TwitterScore offering a judgement of a user’s “popularity”, based on the number of users following you and the number of updates made on your account.

Popular tool Topsy works as a search engine, but it also labels users as “influential” based on several variables such as how often your account is named by other users, the influence of your followers and the links included in your posts.

But Frantzeskos says these metrics can be flawed and do not necessarily reflect the true influence or prominence of a Twitter account.

“A lot of people follow a brand on Twitter because they expect to get deals out of it. However, they might not be tweeting very regularly, perhaps just once a month. You also have people who are very popular but may only tweet irregularly, but people listen to that tweet. Based on these metrics, those accounts are performing badly when that is really not the case.”

“You might look at these accounts as some sort of a temperature check, but I think you need to look at things that these tools can’t measure. Look at what these people are saying, how they are saying it, are they tweeting to a blog or video, etc.”

But while Frantzeskos says the tools must be used in moderation, he agrees third-party applications can be helpful if used in a proper context.

“I do think measuring social media is getting better, generally, and I think what you have to do is use a few of these and then in context figure out what that message is. There are ways to measure the influence of a particular message accurately, but it has to be done in context and not just relying on the number of re-tweets.”