Podcast: Social Media Clarity E04 – Social Media Influence is a Graph

Episode 4 of the Social Media Clarity podcast has just been released.

In this episode host Randy Farmer (@frandallfarmer) and I talk about how to think about social media influence in terms of a social network. Networks can be measured and a variety of patterns can be found in them that indicate the role or pattern of connections a person has.

We talk about why influence is not a single attribute, it is a more complex function of a person’s position within a web of relationships.

People play different roles in social media networks, we talk about three: hubs, bridges and islands. Each plays a different role in a social media network. Each has a different kind of influence.

Once these different roles are measured, people can be ranked in terms of their similarity to one or the other pattern. Highly ranked people can be influential” in terms of their different locations in a network.

In a related blog post, I suggest possible strategies for using network insights to drive a social media campaign: identify key people and their content to guide targeted relationship building. See:

How to build a collection of influential followers in Twitter using social network analysis and NodeXL