Announcing a new metric: the Topical Impact Estimation (TIE) Score.
The TIE score estimates the reach and impact of a content producer (twitter handle or blogger) for a particular topic. It factors in a content producer's immediate audience, as well as its topic-related viral audience. When applied to Twitter, for example, it not only includes the follower count of a twitter handle that posted about a particular topic, but also includes the number of viral impressions that handle generated through retweets of its topic-related content. It is a metric that, by combing reach and relevancy, estimates an individual's ability to influence targeted online conversations.
We believe social influence is entirely dependent on context, something that other measures of influence that count only clicks, comments, followers and retweets fail to capture. For example, Justin Bieber, who has a perfect Klout score, may be highly influential when he tweets about music and pop culture. If he were to tweet about dentures however, he would get far fewer retweets, and command a level of influence less deserving of a perfect score. For a visualization of this example, click here.
To test our new metric we conducted an analysis on influencers for the Social-Loco conference. After the conference, Beyond calculated TIE scores for Twitter handles that tweeted about social and mobile web convergence at the event. Five of the top ten most influential twitter users posting topic-related content (based on the TIE score) had a Klout score less than 50. The results were further evidence that a marginal Klout score does not preclude high levels of influence on a particular topic. Real insight into social influence demands analyzing it in context.