10 Best Tools for Finding Influencers
The business of person-to-person marketing should be so much easier these days with social media everywhere. Once upon a time, lists of influential people were closely guarded secrets, but now those people are on Twitter and LinkedIn and everywhere else with all the other jokers that aren’t worth the effort.
Social media has made these people more reachable in theory, but only if you can sort out all the noise and static and the wanna-be influencers who are just all talk, with no real followers.
What you need is a service that cuts through the clutter to find the people you’re looking for – whether it’s for marketing, story reporting, branding – or anything in between.
As it turns out, there’s more than a handful. Here are 10 different apps, services and start-ups designed to find influential people on social media:
Follower Wonk: Follower Wonk is a strong Twitter analytics tool that is used for lots of things, but one of the things you can do with it is use it analyze your competition’s Twitter following and compare it to yours to determine who should be following you, but isn’t yet — creating a target list and finding meaning in all the noise. Follower Wonk gets some good reviews and has teamed up with Buffer to create a system that shares your tweets at an optimal time.
Twellow: Twellow is a search engine for finding people in directories broken down by expertise. It can find you the Twitter elites for your location, profession or subject matter, but since it’s also possible to add yourself to these lists, it can also be the home of spammers and wanna-be influencers, so be careful.
Klout: Klout is the social network that gamifies users’ social media influence, thus hoping that more people join and invest more time in it than a place like LinkedIn because on Klout you have a score. Also with Klout, you can add topics, and these are the things you are influential in; so you can find influencers in other fields by searching Klout topics.
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Kred: Kred is very similar to Klout, both work on creating a score for a user’s influence potential, and Kred even bills itself as the “social network for influencers.” A user’s score on Kred is not just based solely on his or her influence, but also on their outreach, their willingness to forward along other people’s content.
Keyhole: Keyhole bills itself as an influence marketer by focusing on the contextual influence. It develops that context by analyzing your social media users engaging with your competition and finding out who is leading the conversations at industry events. Keyhole is currently in a closed beta testing phase, but you can request access.
Buzzsumo: The service that Buzzsumo provides is similar to other analytics tools like Follower Wonk, and quickly lets you discover the most shared content or the most reliable influencers in a certain field… and with a clean, simple visual display. For a monthly fee, you can generate exportable data and reports.
Peer Index: UK-based Peer Index calls itself “equity crowdfunding” with an influencer-facing platform that they plan to use to “shape the future of digital marketing.” Maybe not quite ready to go, this one. They’re still looking for investors on Seedr.
Little Bird: By far the best named site in this genre, Little Bird claims to reduce the time it takes to identify influencers and to connect with those influencers and help you leverage those influencers to maximize your reach. Currently used by the likes of Comcast and Iron Mountain.
Traackr: This could be the pick of the litter. Traackr is a robust marketing tool that’s completely focused on building relationships with influencers and then managing those relationships with all sorts of features. More than 140 companies are already using it.
re:fluence: The new app re:fluence (short for “relevant influencers”) was built to find a new way to reliably share content without resorting the blast-emailing press releases into people’s spam folders. Designed with elements of Klout and other influencer finders, re:influence promises to revolutionize engagement across social groups. However, re:influence is still in its alpha stage; limited beta testing will start soon.
