10 ways to determine if you have social influence

Jul
16

You follow 100K people and they all follow you back.
You follow 100K people and 200K follow you back (this person has more influence than the previous).
You have a low (follower/followee) ratio because you un-follow the majority of the people who you previously followed.
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”.
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).
Your twitter CTR is 38% on all the links you share about YOU.
Others randomly RT YOUR Klout score (keyword – RT)
You get invited to speak at every social media conference (even if you have to pay for your own travel, you still have influence).
You check in to a random location on Foursquare and it turns into a Tweetup in honor of YOU!
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.

Author: Michael Brito

Michael Brito is a Vice President of Social Media at Edelman Digital. All thoughts and opinions on this blog are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer or clients; neither past or present. Feel free to follow him on Twitter or subscribe to this blog.

Ben Lang

Aw I guess I dont have social influence.
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.
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
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...
thejasonsadler

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