Nate Riggs: Social Business Strategies; communication, social web strategies, & passion in Columbus, Ohio.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “How To” user-oriented post.  Shame on me.

At Incept (client), we’ve been working to train the iCME’s (client link, too) to use Twitter to connect with customers, donors and various member-based organizations.  Part of the training is also teaching each individual team member how to grow their own influence on Twitter.

By combining two well-made (and free) tools, you – as a marketer, CEO, PR professional, sales person or even customer service professional – can gauge where you are in terms of your personal presence and how you can continue to improve.

We use two tools for benchmarking each of Incept’s iCME’s.  Cheryl and I also use these two nice applications to benchmark our own Twitter presences as we grow.

Step 1 – Measure How You Use Twitter

The first page you should bookmark in your browser tab is TweetStats.  It’s an “oldie but goodie,” developed a few years back by Damon Cortesi.  TweetStats is effective because it offers a view into how the individual being measured is using Twitter as a medium.

By entering your Twitter name, you can generate reports and simple graphs (from the “XML Fairies,” as Damon use to say) that give you insight into:

• Tweet Timeline – Average tweets per day and per month.  You also get an a overview of your entire usage history on Twitter.
• Tweet Density – What times of day you tweet and how much.
• Aggregate Tweets – TweetStats gives you a nice display of how many times you tweet per day and how many times each hour.
• Percent of @ Replies – Not only will TweetStats break down your total percentage of @ replies, but it will also show you the folks who you tweet with most frequently.
• Top Interfaces Used – This is a tool metric that easily shows you what tools you use to engage Twitter and how often – an important metric when considering the difference between engaging at your desktop versus a mobile device.
• Who You Retweet – This is a critical metric in terms of relationship building.  Essentially, TweetStats will show you whose content you share and support over time.

If you begin to track and analyze all of these metrics combined, you’ll get a holistic picture of where you are falling short when building out your presence.  Remember that the breadth and frequency of your presence creates exponential leverage on the web.  TweetStats is a tool you can use to track and improve your own usage and behavior patterns.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• Are there times of the day when I’m not tweeting, but I should be?
• Am I tweeting with the right people?
• Am I tweeting enough to show up on others’ radars?
• Are the right people on my radar, according to my personal brand or business objectives?

There are plenty more questions to ask, depending on what you are trying to accomplish in terms of conversion and relationships.  When considering these questions, the key is to be honest about the answers.  Ultimately, it’s your responsibility to build your own presence.

Step 2 – Measure Your Influence

Have you heard of Klout?  By this point in the Twitter game, chances are you have.  If not, this article in CNN Money does a nice job on telling the story.  Over the past two years, Klout has become the standard measurement of influence in the world of Twitter.

Okay, that last statement is self-proclaimed by the folks at Klout.  However, I tend to believe that it’s also backed by the multiple integrations that Klout has inked in the company’s own business development efforts.  Some of these include Hootsuite and FlowTown, two rising applications that are making noticeable waves in the social media ocean.

What I like about Klout is that they take into account 25 variables related to conversation.  A while back, these used to be disclosed on the site, but they are no longer detailed today.  (That said, if it were me, I’d protect my intellectual property too.)  The bottom line is that Klout looks at everything from memetics (how things spread) to conversation metrics and who responds to the content you share.

Klout scores deliver a variety of metrics including true reach, an achievement-based badge system and keyword analysis to benchmark a user’s influence against the rest of the Twittersphere, ranking individuals in a global percentile.

For fun, read up on Joe Ferndandez (Co-founder and CEO) here.  He has an interesting story about how he first got interested in online influence tracking.  Ouch!

How Klout & TweetStats Compliment Each Other for Benchmarking

In large part, your influence is determined by your level of participation in Twitter.  This is where TweetStats plays into the benchmarking strategy.

Again, start by examining how you use Twitter today.  Note any holes you happen to find in your usage patterns and set short-term goals to improve on those behaviors.  After a period of time during which you’ve made sincere effort to change you user behavior, reassess your Klout influence score and see if you’ve improved in the way you intended.

• Do you see a percent of change in each area?  Is it small or large?
• Are you moving your influence in the direction you wish?  Why or why not?
• Have any areas of influence suffered while others improved?  Why might that be?

At Incept, the iCME’s will be tracking this on a biweekly basis.  We’re using a simple worksheet (which you can download below) as a planning document to set up targeted areas for incremental improvements over the next two weeks.

Klout Influence Benchmarking Worksheet

Remember that with influence and Twitter presence, one size does not fit all.  The goal for using this worksheet is to develop a personal improvement plan and individual action items for each iCME so they can increase their own influence on a case-by-case basis.

Does this approach make sense to you?  What questions can I help you answer?

nateriggs

I advise mid-sized & large organizations on how to adopt and use social media to market through organizational culture and better serve their clients. I'm also a blended family dad who enjoys music, photography and distance racing. When I'm not writing here, you can find me writing over at the Content Marketing Institute. Like what you've read so far? Then why not subscribe HERE?

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