How influential are you?

What kind of impact are you making in the cyber world? Are you touching lives or are you parroting mindless information? These are some important questions you should be asking yourself. Do you know how to distinguish the difference? In truth, the difference lies in how your content is received by your audience. Your audience decides how important it is. So how do you know if you blogs content is making the grade? According to Klout.com and PeerIndex.com they tell you exactly what kind of influence you have on your audience. Klout and PeerIndex use different measuring ingredients in order to determine your overall score.

Klout made huge headlines in 2010 when both Peter Shankman and the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas decided to offer VIP access to guests based on their Klout Scores.

Klout measures influence on a scale of 1 to 100, with a higher number correlating to a broader sphere of influence.

Klout claims to use 35 variables from Facebook and Twitter to measure concepts such as True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.

True Reach is “the size of your audience”. That means all your friends and followers. A great feature of Klout is that they eliminate inactive and spam accounts. This way they don’t factor in things that haven’t been influenced.

Amplification Probability is pretty straightforward as well. It is the likelihood that your content will be acted upon by others, whether a retweet, a comment, or a like.

Network Score is the ”influence level” of your audience. This means you are more likely to have a higher network score if Kevin Costner follows you than if I follow you.

PeerIndex on the other hand, goes about measuring influence, or as PeerIndex calls it, “online authority”, a little differently. Like Klout, there are three major items that mark up your score.

The first is called your Authority Score. PeerIndex chooses up to 8 benchmark topics that you have “authority” on, and then calculates your score relative to other people in your network.

Your Resonance Score is similar to Amplification Probability. It measures how much your opinion on a topic may resonate within a community like retweets, comments and likes.

Next is your Audience Score, which is not a measure of how many followers or readers you have, but how many people listen to you and act upon what you are saying. Such as, if you have 1000 followers, but only 5 actually retweet what you are saying, you will have a lower audience score.

There is also your Activity Score and Realness Score. Your activity score simply measures how active you are on social networks, and the realness score determines whether you are a human or a robot.
PeerIndex measures influence on a scale of 1 to 100, with a higher number correlating to a broader sphere of influence.

What Social Networks do they measure?

Once upon a time, people could be influential on the web, but Twitter really took the idea of influence to another level. Not only were celebrities such as Justin Bieber able to amass millions of followers, but everyday people are able to gain significant followings and become influential. A piece of information can be retweeted by thousands, and a movement can start with a simple hashtag.

Therefore it’s no surprise that Klout initially focused on Twitter as the sole measurement of online influence.

This line (taken from their About page) says it all: “The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.”

However, in 2011, Klout offered Facebook and Linkedin integration (beta) as well.

PeerIndex (on the other hand) offers a more robust selection of social networks to integrate. The more obvious are, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, but PeerIndex also includes sources (such as blogs) that Klout does not.

Which service is a better measure of online influence?

Originally I was intrigued by Klout. Of course Twitter was where the bar was set; Facebook was still in beta. But if you really didn’t spend a lot of time on Twitter, your score suffered. Now with Facebook and Linkedin, the scores are higher, but perhaps not a true picture of your influence.

PeerIndex includes social websites and blogs into my influence score that Klout does not. This gives you a broader arena to gather information from and a truer picture of your influence.

My issue with Klout is that it doesn’t tell the whole story (neither does PeerIndex but it does a much better job). There are a lot of bloggers out there who probably aren’t active on Twitter or Facebook, and their Klout scores suffer as a result.

PeerIndex also does something interesting that Klout does not: it also mentions what topics you are talking about.

That’s huge. So if I have a PeerIndex score of 75 and my most talked about topics are Social Media and Digital Marketing, then it would be fairly easy to identify me as an expert in those fields.

In Closing

I believe that PeerIndex offers a better indicator of online social influence than does Klout. The main reason is that Klout leaves out a few networks where many exercise online influence.

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