Brands that understand how a marketplace or issue is affected by a network of influencers, and can incorporate those insights into their marketing strategies, have a clear competitive advantage. That is why we are excited to announce the release of the latest Appinions influence marketing platform, which incorporates the most sophisticated multi-channel influence algorithm on the market today.
Why did we make such significant changes to our core algorithm? First, as the media landscape continues to change and new networks enter the market, we want to ensure that we are in a position to seamlessly and effortlessly incorporate these emerging sources into our data set. Our new algorithm framework has the flexibility to include any new networks that become more prominent and increasingly important to marketers. Second, to give our customers a more complete understanding of the influence network, we built in a mechanism to identify and quantify the relationship between influencers, those they influence, and those people who impact the influencers. Ultimately, this presents an unprecedented way to measure the attention of a topic by capturing the dynamics of the specific influence network.
What’s in a score?
Appinions’ influence scores quantify the reactions to an individual’s opinions on a topic by analyzing three elements:
1. Influencees: The people or entities who reacted to an influencer’s opinion, weighted by their respective influence on that topic;
2. Publishing Sources: The credibility of the outlet where the reaction was published or consumed; and
3. Frequency: The volume of opinions attributed to that influencer over the past 60 days.
Influence is about action. The addition of weighted influencees improves upon the “who” in addition to the “where” and “how often” elements that were previously used to calculate influence scores.
The Influence Map
If a score is how influence is quantified, the Influence Map is how influence is visualized (see Figure 1 below). With the launch of the Influence Map, Appinions demonstrates the ability to show an entity’s influence beyond the score. This interactive visualization illustrates the relationship between the influencer and those who are being influenced. This influencer-influencee dynamic that Appinions exposes provides our customers with an actionable and more comprehensive influence network analysis.
A marketing program is only as good as the data that informs it. With the improvements to our algorithm and the launch of the Influence Map, Appinions is revolutionizing how brands can measure and analyze influence beyond the individual influencers.
The Influence Map for Dean Takahashi visualizes the relationships between Dean and other influencers on the topic of wearable devices.
