321, 313, 535

Those are my current Twitter numbers for Following, Followers, Updates. They’re not high and I am not on a mission to attract thousands of followers nor am I auto-following everyone who follows me. I follow people who contributing to my interests in a meaningful way. They generally follow me back, hence those nearly equal numbers.

A Twitter Profile I am unlikely to Follow

A recent follower’s numbers were something like this: 1827, 129, 54 I did not follow back because this person is not contributing to the conversation. There are algorithms out there that assign a ranking to Twitterers based on these numbers but they place too much emphasis on larger numbers over smaller numbers. This gets us into the tricky territory of measuring Influence and Reach in social media.

Reach in social media

Reach is a calculation of how many people actually see that user’s contributions. On the face of it, calculating this should be simple: I have 313 followers so that’s how many people I reach. Or is it? How many Retweet my contributions and how many people follow them? This is entirely dependent on the value of my contributions- if they are stupid they won’t get spread virally, if they are good and relevant to our shared interests then they probably will get spread.

Influence in social media

Which brings us to influence. Influence must be separated from reach. If I am a theoretical physicist who is an expert on a very esoteric subject and I am followed by all 32 people that understand what I’m talking about, how influential am I? In my field, extremely influential, in spite of those low numbers. My reach is the entire universe of my interest group and my influence is high because I am considered an expert in that niche.

(BTW, an expert has been defined as someone who reads a news item about their field and is already aware of the development)

For social media marketers Reach + Influence + Keywords = Targeted Prospects

The importance of this discussion to social media marketers is that keyword search can help you find connect with very specific people that will be interested in whatever you are marketing. In other words, the holy grail of targeted marketing.