How To Identify Mass Influencers

Mass influencer’s are very important to get your message out there. Therefore marketers seek new possibilities to find these mass influencer’s. Klout claims to have found a way to identify them.

Not necessarily Twitters with the most followers are the most influential people but those who strike conversation and form peoples opinions. Augie Ray identified this group as “social broadcasters” and gives an overview in his study “Tapping The Entire Online Peer Influence Pyramid” and shows how to attract them. Attracting is one thing, finding them is the other. A new Swiss start-up has claimed to have found a way to identify the most important people on Twitter. The service called “Klout” gives Twitters a score between 100 and 1, based on their influence. One important factor they measure is how often a blog-entry or Tweet gets re-Tweeted.

An example given by the service is Barack Obama, who has over 1 million followers less than Ashton Kutcher. The President has way more influence on followers though than the movie star. Especially news portals are ranked very high, since around 50% of all Tweets is news.

The service is very inserting for marketers, since they now have a possibility to distinguish people who are important according to their preferences. For example Klout has evaluated that mashable, Scobleizer and ShebaJo are very influential when it comes to the iPhone, on the other hand they are not so strong on selecting coffee or on vacation advice.

The services goal is to find the most important people in every market section. Las Vegas Hotel visitors, coffee drinker or movie enthusiasts who actively shape others opinion. Companies than can shepherd these people and give them free tickets, coffee or whatever they want to get to the public.

Klout has found an investor and is financed with 1.6 million venture capital. The company want to be profitable at the beginning of 2011. Companies such as Starbuck have already struck deals with Klout and the story is one to follow.

Check out Klout and your Ranking (although it won’t work for me – they still seem to be in their beta phase)

Do you think this will replace sponsored Tweets?