How to Use Twitter to Increase your Influence

You may be an expert in your chosen field, but do you have influence? Do others recognize your expertise and are influenced by it? Did you know you could use Twitter to both increase your influence and be recognized as an expert?

What is Influence?

SearchCRM defines social media influence as: “An individual’s ability to affect other people’s thinking in a social online community”.

There’s suddenly a plethora of tools to measure your social media influence. Tools such as Klout and Followerwonk measure your influence relative to others in your industry. They assign you an arbitrary score based on a host of factors such as your number of followers, the hashtags you use and what you tweet about.

So who is looking at these numbers and more importantly, do they really predict a person’s online influence?

More and more organizations are starting to ask for Klout scores as a way to vet candidates for job interviews. Salesforce asked only those candidates to apply for a job who have a Klout score of 35 or higher.  Burson-Marsteller, a global PR firm based out of New York actually looks at the Klout Score of people who share bad news about one of their customers and use this information on if and how to respond. American Airlines offered passengers with Klout scores higher than 55 access to nearly 40 American Airline Admiral Club lounges, worldwide.

How Can you be Recognized on Twitter as an Influential Expert

If these scores that attempt to measure social media influence are gaining importance in the eyes of employers, how can you increase your influencer score?

Here are three simple, yet successful tactics for increasing your online influence on Twitter:

1.   Choose the Topics and Associated Hashtags That You Want to be An Expert On

Tools which measure your social media influence essentially extract data on the number of times you tweet using certain hashtags. So one way to increase your social media influence would be to pick a few hashtags which are popular in the area you want to be an expert on and use them consistently and frequently. Here are a few examples of niches and associated hashtags which could be used in the HR industry.

Leadership: #Leadership #influence #career

Human Resource: #HR, #HCM, #HumanResource

Management: #Management #Business #Leader

These are just a few examples of hashtags you could consider. Picking the right ones will give the tools a way to recognize you and improve your overall social media influence ranking.

2.   Make Twitter Lists of Influencers

Making an “Interest List” of other influencers in the niche you’d like to specialize in provides two key benefits:

–      It keeps you in the loop of ongoing conversations

–      By simply RT-ing what other influencers say you can increase your total number of tweets with a specific hashtag

Other than making your own lists, you could subscribe to Twitter lists other people have created. Take a look at my Asian Business Leaders list which compiles awesome leaders in Asia who are active on Twitter. Find other lists on Twitter that interest you and subscribe to them for the same benefits.

3.   Measure your ROI – Return on Influence

ROI is the new ROI – Return on Influence is the new Return on Investment. You’re not only looking at how many people you’ve reached, you’re also looking at how many of them have acted on what you’ve posted. Rather than just a quantitative measure, you need to supplement with a qualitative assessment as well.

Your return on influence is measured on twitter by the number of Retweets (RTs), replies, favorites and clicks your tweets receive.

Twitter is just one social media tool you could use to build your network and advance your career. Sign up to my blog and receive my new Social Media Toolkit to Advance your Career [PDF] containing all of my 15 recommended tools.

Are you using Twitter to increase your online influence? Share your experience in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Ilse