Home Social Media 10 ways to determine if you have social influence
July 16, 2010 10 Comments

10 ways to determine if you have social influence

  1. You follow 100K people and they all follow you back.
  2. You follow 100K people and 200K follow you back (this person has more influence than the previous).
  3. You have a low (follower/followee) ratio because you un-follow the majority of the people who you previously followed.
  4. You go to the local grocery store and a random person shouts “Hey, I know you! I follow you on Twitter and RT everything you share”.
  5. You have a personal Facebook Fan Page (it doesn’t matter how many people like you either. The mere fact that you have one is all that matters).
  6. Your twitter CTR is 38% on all the links you share about YOU.
  7. Others randomly RT YOUR Klout score (keyword – RT)
  8. You get invited to speak at every social media conference (even if you have to pay for your own travel, you still have influence).
  9. You check in to a random location on Foursquare and it turns into a Tweetup in honor of YOU!
  10. You get your profile image on Fast Company; you Tweet it, it gets RT’d … and the cycle continues.

In case you didn’t get it, I am being completely facetious with this post.  I personally think that anyone who considers themselves to have “real influence” just because they have a certain amount of followers or fans is a complete joke. My opinion only.

There are only 3 things that I care about having influence over; my family (and friends), my co-workers and my clients in that order. Everything else is irrelevant.

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Filed Under: Social Media
About Michael Brito

Michael Brito is a Senior Vice President of Social Business Planning at Edelman Digital. He helps his clients transform their organizations to be more open, collaborative and socially proficient; with the end result of creating shared value with employees, partners and customers. Prior to Edelman, Michael worked for Intel and Hewlett Packard in various social media marketing roles. Opinions posted here are his own.

Feel free to follow him on Twitter, subscribe to this blog or read some more of his content on Social Business News.

  • http://www.communicationammo.com Sean Williams

    Love it – today's #kaizenblog chat was on influence, and it was really interesting. Far more thoughtful and philosophical than “strictly business” as I expected.

  • thejasonsadler

    HA! I like the speaking one (#8) the best… that was a shocker for me to find out people did that.

  • http://twitter.com/Sofieneslk Sofiene El Kebir

    I think that in order to impress your clients you should show/prove that as a social media expert, you have some kind of influence on a certain number of people other than your family, friends and co-workers…your peers all around the world for example…

  • http://seanseo.com Sean SEO Marketer

    Yes, as quantity doesn't matter only quality matters! Huge numbers but no retweets, no traffic, no real followers all waste. More followers + fewer retweets = spammers

  • http://ineedhits.com/ Search Engine Marketing

    Cool list. But as per my experience Twitter is a great traffic generation tool.Although it is no follow, but we get lot of traffic by adding number of followers in twitter, by submitting your site story, so that others people vote your story and you can also vote other people story to get quality traffic.

  • http://twitter.com/entrepreneurpro Ben Lang

    Aw I guess I dont have social influence.

  • http://www.britopian.com Michael Brito

    it’s okay, either do I.

  • http://techoba.com techoba

    I agree with the last line about friends, family and coworkers, but I'd love to have this kind of social influence (10 points above). It really wouldn't hurt!! ;) Haha!!

  • http://NicholasScalice.com Nicholas Scalice

    You really had me going with this post for a minute there! Good one. I agree, that it is difficult to base something as hard to define as social influence on criteria such as this. Nice site all around.

  • http://twitter.com/deannatroupe DeAnna Troupe

    ROTFL. That post just made my day!