Last week I spoke at Measurefest, a conference dedicated to analytics, marketing measurement and CRO. The topic of my talk was, “Network mapping and visualising relative influence”. In case you missed it, here it is in blog form…
We need to move on from basic influencer identification based on Twitter bios, to finding people based on their network connections.
Drawing networks on NodeXL can visually communicate the meaning of relevance in influencer identification to senior stakeholders.
And we can use conversational data from influencer networks to inform and evaluate content strategy.
Let’s look at basic influencer identification first. When we’re trying to find influential people around a key topic, we’re likely to search Twitter bios for related keywords, to search Twitter conversations, maybe using buzz monitoring software like Brandwatch, and to search blogs based on the title and content of the blog. Once we’ve got a list of potential influencers, we’re likely to filter and prioritise them based on things like follower count, Klout score, MozRank or inbound links. This often produces quite a good list of influential people around a topic.