Every day, it seems there is a new service to measure the elusive metric known as “Influence”. Do you have “Klout”, “Kred”, the most 1+ in your circles, the most pins? Many will come, many will fall by the wayside, and others will morph into longer-lasting services. While I have to shake my head at any marketing firm putting all their stock into one metric as the yardstick of effective social media advertising, I can understand the urge that print media professionals have to try and determine the circulation for an online outlet, as it’s a little more involved than determining how many people read a specific newspaper.
While I think it’s a flawed model to base an advertising campaign off what XYZ service has to say about a website rather than doing the research for yourself to find the real numbers and relevance for your brand, I certainly always welcome the chance to sign up for new things that may benefit me as a publisher. Like it or not, brands want to see that you have a presence they can measure in things like Klout, so it’s handy to make sure you are established; plus, how else could I get a $5 McDonald’s gift card as a “Perk” reward for my vast influence? 😉 So when newcomers HireInfluence approached me to write this post and test out their new service, I was curious to see what it would look like. HireInfluence says that it will both measure your social influence as well as connect you to a database to be accessed by their marketing clients seeking outlets to work with; the latter was of the most interest to me, as any good businessman knows the importance of networking whenever the opportunity presents itself. So, I set about registering.
As with most of these social media influence networks, you sign up by logging in with your Twitter account, at which point you can add other social networks to up your score. HireInfluence has a lot of LinkedIn qualities, such as asking for a resume and other career highlights as a way to boost your profile. Once this is done, you can view the overview of your profile and strength score. Mine is currently listed as 25.4, or 59%. What I found most interesting about this is the analysis that is provided of your social networks – for example, how many of your Twitter followers appear to be active and statistics regarding the reach of your most recent Facebook and Twitter posts. I may refer to this in the future just for my own number crunching, so that’s a point in the favor of HireInfluence that other “Social cred” websites are generally lacking. They’re also giving away 3 $100 Amazon gift cards to random early adopters who sign up prior to March 25th, so there’s an angle that Contest Corner readers will appreciate too!
Time will tell if HireInfluence will catch on with advertisers or not, but for a few minutes of my time, it’s worth the investment to add myself to the database which may later connect me to clients. And as a bonus, the next time a colleague says, “What’s your HireInfluence page?” I won’t have to groan to myself, “Oh, another thing I have to sign up for?!” 😉
So tell me, bloggers: Will you be signing up for HireInfluence?
Interesting…I just signed up and trying to figure out the navigation. Thanks for sharing, we’ll see how it goes :0)
This sounds cool!
Sounds interesting! Thanks for sharing
This is new to me, thanks for sharing it. I’ll have to explore it to figure it out.
I hadn’t heard of this. It sounds interesting, I’ll have to poke around in there. Thanks.
Sounds like a great concept. It will be interesting to see if it catches on. I’m going to take a peek around.