Keeping in with the growing dominance of social media, many allied services and utilities have fast emerged on the scene, all claiming to accurately score social influence of a brand or an individual professional on basis of their following, reach and activity. These avenues not just consider the total number of friends/ followers, but also evaluate the influence index in qualitative terms – to assign specific score. They are constantly refining methodology to sift through a vast pool of information and incorporate both generic and niche social networks in the process.

Audience score and other attributes

Among the noteworthy players in this domain, PeerIndex is continually evolving its algorithms for improving their value. Apart from refining the scores related to Audience, Activity, and Authority, it’s looking to improve its range and depth of automatically generated topics; increase the sample sizes and extend various metrics to remove biases. Your score can be treated as a relative measure of online authority that reflects the overall end impact of your online activity and the reflection of your social and reputational capital across the web. It tool tries to emphasize that mere popularity doesn’t denote authority by including an Activity score that accounts for a proactive individual who enjoys more attention of people following the topics they are interested in.

The tool builds up your Authority fingerprint on a topic-by-topic level using our eight benchmark topics. Someone, however, cannot be an authority without a receptive audience. A receptive audience is one that listens and is receptive to the discussions of members of the community. To capture this aspect, PeerIndex includes an Audience score we calculate for each profile. A Topic Resonance Score shows how your action within a topical community resonates with other members in terms of your authority, behavior, reach and the end result.

A mobile app to measure influence

Klout is another key player in this fast-evolving space. The average score on it is usually in the range of high teens, whereas a score in the 40s will denote a strong niche following. After aligning with Blockboard earlier this year, Klout has been working towards building its presence on mobile phones and further expanding awareness of influence in the real world.  The service has just announced its new iPhone app (Klout for iPhone v1.0) that will help users track their influence on the go. If you wish to know your score even without even opening it, you just need to glance at the Klout icon on your device. When it changes or someone assigns you +K, you will receive a push notification. The iPhone app also contains a snapshot of your influence-related data, including influential topics.

Your rank in a topical community

One more tool for social influence measurement is Kred that tracks in realtime your online social influence and outreach. Developed by a social data mining startup, PeopleBrowsr, it figures out the communities that a user belongs on basis of the information in their Twitter bio, and shows the influence of whole community and how a person is ranked in that community.

Real-world accomplishments matter

Kred claims to be more transparent than Klout. It shows exactly how a user got score and let the person drill down to each retweet to check its worth. A mention is rated higher than follow, and so on! It lets one incorporate real-world accomplishments such as honors, awards, degrees, and certificates. It looks for small, focused networks of people and how they can be influential. Brand managers can accordingly outline their own communities they will then track.