Your blog stats page or perhaps analytics software will tell you which of your entries are the most popular and your comments page shows which posts get the best responses – but how do you know the more subtle effects of your online behaviour?
Amy Gardner is a communities specialist at PeerIndex. She has a background in television and journalism, and has a particular interest in using online platforms to build and connect with niche communities. Here she explains how PeerIndex can help you understand your online status and impact across social media.
Blog visits and followers don’t automatically translate into influence: we all know from the playground that popularity doesn’t necessarily equal trust. So it can be helpful to know who is listening to you from which communities.
When you register at PeerIndex, we pull all your online activity together in one place and analyse it. Your PeerIndex score takes into account all of your different online profiles such as your blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. It shows how effectively you are using different platforms to grow your online influence.
Your score is based on three areas: Activity, Authority and Audience (If you enter your Twitter handle into PeerIndex without registering, you’ll still see some details but these are an approximation. Registering means your score will be accurate.)
A good place to start assessing your online performance is your topics fingerprint. The shape of your graph indicates how you present yourself online. Are you clearly focused on one area of expertise, such as the arts, or do you like to comment on anything and everything? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being a polymath, but if you want to build an online brand that draws people to your parenting blog, it makes sense to talk about related things online.
Online influence is measured so that people can know who to trust. Keep an eye on your PeerIndex stats, especially how many people retweet you. It means they think your comments are worth sharing. See what types of links, twitpics and information get the best responses – and do more of the same.
But don’t forget that Audience size doesn’t necessarily equal influence. You may have lots of followers but not engage with them regularly, or have a small but active audience. Bloggers need to strike a balance between the two. If you want to bring more traffic to your site, you might want to increase your audience size. The trick is making sure you continue to engage with that audience and share with them as you grow.
Finally, creating a group can increase your online visibility. We’ve teamed up with BritMums to make a series of groups. These are a great resource for people looking for parenting blogs on a particular subject. By making your own group you can define your own community. It could be a group indexing a niche community, like bloggers focused on primary education, children’s clothes or infant health, or it could be something a lot broader such as parent bloggers.
Look out for our next guest post, where we’ll go into more detail about how to build and use groups…
–Amy Gardner, www.peerindex.com
About Holly Seddon
Holly Seddon is a writer, editor and community consultant and helped launched the community for Adoption UK, which won charity website of the year just 9 months later. She also writes a music blog.