Today, online influencer are more powerful than they themselves could ever imagine. With a simple click of a button that says ‘follow’ a content viewer has admitted that the ‘influencer’s’ opinions matter be it interesting, hilarious or thought provoking. This helps companies and event managers identify who people are listening to in a particular geographic market and how soft persuasion can be used as a tool to meet the company’s objectives. 

That being said, I do not mean that, companies use ‘influencers’ as a means to exploit blind faith and trust that comes with ‘following’ a person. It simply means that identifying influencers can give companies another medium to engage more effectively with their audiences who don’t care for ‘hard-selling’. 

So what are the tools that can be used to identify these ‘influencers’ in the whirlpool of digital media? There are the top 3 tools you can use for different platforms:

1) Google Plus : Circle Count

Circle Count is designed to help you understand Google+, the homepage of the tool shows popular categories like: people with highly engaging content, most followed profiles and pages, and today’s cream of the crop which highlights interesting profiles. All of the categories are great places to look for inspiration and creative ideas.

2) Twitter: Follower-Wonk 

The tool, which delves deeply into Twitter analytics, can show you things from who your followers are and where they’re located to when they tweet, what keywords are used most often by your followers (or those you follow), who you’re following relative to someone else, and when your most active hours for retweets are.

3) LinkedIn – Influencer Program

The Influencer Program on LinkedIn allows thought leaders to share their original content directly with LinkedIn users.You can browse influencers by a list of them all, or by channel which sorts the posts by topic. The channels cover a wide variety of information from accounting, customer service, the economy, and green business to healthcare, online advertising, retail and technology. 

These three tools provide all the basic information needed in the most effective way to identify ‘influencers’ and partner with them in order to create another avenue for digital user engagement. I believe that marketers have still not fully understood and integrated these media channels in their overall marketing strategy. Who knows, tomorrow ‘influencer marketing’ might become a whole field in itself! In that case, you should promise to remember what Little Moo predicted long, long ago :)