How do you know you are losing influence online?

The first thing you need to determine is if and how you are losing influence. Just because you feel like you are losing influence doesn’t mean you actually are.
There are two ways of measuring influence online: short-term and long-term. Let’s look at the short-term first.
Here are some common ways to measure short-term influence:

• Klout – People either love Klout or hate it. Those who hate it see it as a meaningless way to measure online influence, one that is based on algorithms that can be gamed and don’t reflect real-world influence. Alex Braunstein poured significant time and energy into proving the Klout influence metric is flawed. Rohn Jay Miller encourages you to Delete Your Klout Profile Now! But if you decide to use Klout to determine how to gain influence online, I suggest you read Ben Straley’s Losing Klout: Four Questions About Third-Party Influence. His four questions will help you pinpoint the correct influencers you need to engage if you want to raise your influence online. Even if you hate Klout, it may be hard to ignore. Retailers are starting to use it as a means to reward customers with high Klout scores. The Palms Casino resort in Las Vegas checked the Klout scores of guests at check-in, giving upgrades to those with high scores. It now has the highest Klout score among its peers. So, are you losing Klout?
• Social signals – How many followers do you have on major social sites? How many new followers are you getting every week? How many retweets or likes is your content getting? Then ask this question about people in the same industry, people who you might consider competitors. Compare yourself in each category to gauge whether you are losing or gaining influence. Here are some tools to use:
  • PeerIndex, which is a lot like Klout, gives you an overall score based upon three subsets: Authority, Audience and Activity.
  • Twitalyzer looks specifically at Twitter and scores you on Engagement, Impact, Reach, Velocity and a few other metrics.
  • Crowdbooster also uses Twitter to gauge your online influence by measuring the growth of your followers and who your top retweeters are. And the scatter plot graph is really cool too: it lets you see your most engaging tweets.

Even though it may seem obvious, I should probably point out why I consider the above short-term indicators. They can change dramatically in a short period of time. As Seth Godin put it, they twitch.
Besides, as a marketing professional you should be looking at the performance of your social media activities on a daily basis. The following long-term metrics, however, you may need only to look at on a weekly basis:

• Search rankings – If you are an SEO, then you will naturally think about search rankings as a way to measure your online influence. Back in the old days, position was a matter of creating quality content. These days, though, search position is affected by social signals and can be a real-time means to measure your influence online. The more quality posts you can write that get a decent share on the social web, the more influence you have in search. Keep in mind that changes to search position, unless impacted by a recent algorithm update, don’t change dramatically from day to day. It can be weeks or months before you see real change in these positions.
• Blog engagement – Another indicator that you are losing influence deals with your blog engagement. This is where you look at basic metrics like hits, page views, referrer sources, etc. Are they declining? What about comments? Are you getting fewer? Are you getting fewer links back to your blog posts? Even take into consideration the number of emails you get in your inbox. Fewer emails could mean that people are no longer looking to you for advice.
• Google Trends – Finally, you could use Google Trends to get a grip on your online influence. In my experience, this is a metric that’s tough to use for individual influence unless you are a celebrity. Still, it’s helpful to search for long-tail keywords geared toward your industry. For example, as an SEO, you could search “Penguin recovery tips” to see how you are trending for that keyword.

It’s probably helpful at this point to suggest that you try a handful of different social and search metric plug-and-play tools. Use your favorites.
Once you’ve collected all this data into a spreadsheet, your next step is to consider why you are losing influence.
In some ways it could be that you’re not blogging as frequently because you are doing more speaking engagements. If that was the case, then you could probably just pick back up the pace with the blogging. You have to consider whether it’s worth it, however, given what you are gaining from your speaking gigs.