Me, unpopular at age 12.
I was not one of the “popular” kids growing up. I was that skinny kid with glasses and braces who hung out with the theater kids and the band geeks and who cried when I lost the all-city spelling bee over the word ambidextrous.
Those of you who survived adolescence, pat yourselves on the back. You made it! Now brace yourselves: there is a new group of popular kids in your social sphere. They have influence. They have followers. They have Klout, people. They are social media socialites and you should get to know them.
Why should you or I care about this new group of popular kids? Because they influence the audiences you’re trying to reach, they can help you grow your networks, and – if you play your cards right – they will become some of your best brand advocates.
So how can you tell who the popular kids are in your social circles? Below are two of my favorite free, informative tools that can help you determine who the big players are in your areas of interest, who and how they influence, and where you fit in the new social landscape.
Klout measures online influence based on an individual’s ability to drive action. Every time you post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Foursquare, Klout calculates how many people you influence, how much you influence them, and how influential they are.
Once it calculates these areas of influence, Klout assigns you a score from 1 to 100 and shows how you compare to other individuals in your social circle. Klout also shows what topics you are influential on and helps you find other people who share your interests.
Who do you influence?
Along with a bunch of other cool data visualization tools, visual.ly can generate a personalized infographic of your Twitter persona (or anyone else you’re interested in learning more about) based on what you tweet. Visual.ly also lets you perform a side-by-side comparison of two Twitter profiles at once. Let’s say you wanted to see how you stack up against your favorite celebrity. The “Twitterize Yourself!” feature can generate a visual comparison that looks something like this:
(I was pretty excited to see that Lady Gaga and I share the same geeky grin and not surprised to see that her wardrobe is 1,000 times more fabulous than mine.)
The “Twitterize Me!” function also lets you compare information like followers to following ratios, tweets seen per day and shared topics:
Lady Gaga may be more interesting, but I’m more social. I can live with that.
And finally, a note on popularity: My mom never understood why I never saw myself as a “popular” kid growing up. After all, she argued, I had a great group of friends and an active social life. As I look back now, I realize that I was popular among the people who shared my interests (think: Glee club, debate team).
That’s a good lesson to keep in mind as you navigate the social space, too: Sometimes it’s not about the quantity of your connections, but the quality. Focus on the people who are talking about the things that are important to you. Find them, follow them, engage them with interesting content and soon you’ll find that you are building your social popularity in the spaces that matter.