I am suspicious of tools that claim to identify influencers on Twitter. Most of them are influenced by an obvious but highly dubious metric – namely, a users’ number of followers. But every day, new tools and techniques make it easier for the average Twitter user to zoom into the follower-count stratosphere. This rockets them up the list at sites like Twitter Grader and Twitalyzer, and gives them more prominent indexing in directories like We Follow and Twellow.

Most of those sites also consider other factors, of course; Mashable provides a detailed analysis of them.

I prefer to use three other metrics in addition to those tools:

1. Number of retweets: Retweetist
2. Number of times the Twitter user’s bit.ly links are clicked. If you have 200 followers and tweet a link that is clicked 120 times, that’s a pretty good sign your network is listening to you.

3. Offline identity. Hundreds of reporters who are new to Twitter have few followers, low influence scores and Twitter Grader grades. And yet many of them can influence millions.

Influence plays an important role of social media marketing. We live in a world where brands buy tens of millions of impressions to reach the right tens of thousands of people. Online influencers create trends and inform buying decisions, so it benefits these companies to invest time and resources in cultivating them.

Significant literature supports this premise, from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” to scholarly studies in the Harvard Business Review.

About a year ago, Duncan Watts argued against influencer theory, suggesting trends are a result of society’s readiness for them, rather than the power of an elite group of tastemakers.

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” he writes. Succeeding with a new product is less about finding the perfect hipster to infect and more about gauging the public’s mood. There will always be a first mover, but the contingent nature of that move makes the person in question an “accidental influencer.”
I am more inclined toward Gladwell’s model than Duncan’s. Regardless of society’s readiness for a new trend, I believe the means and messenger of its introduction shape its impact.

I actually am less interested in influencers themselves than I am in those who influence the influencers. I believe that Twitter offers average marketers, even those without sophisticated tools, a unique ability to find out who is influencing each other. One simple way to do this is to use tweetstats to see who an influencer @replies the most.

No matter what tools you use, the influencer campaign’s success depends on how you relate to the influencers once you locate them. If you intend to launch a campaign targeting influencers, the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association’s site is a must read:

“Influencer programs are, by definition, long-term, multi-year commitments designed to build a relationship; they are not marketing campaigns. Campaigns can augment influencer efforts to help find, activate, or engage influencers in particular activities (like a product launch), but influencer programs need to level out the roller coaster of connections provided by campaigns.”

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