How PR Reps and Brand Managers Measure Your Social Media Influence

The Mind of Moms Summit was offered as a partner program at the recent BlogWorld Expo. I attended Rules of Engagement with Barbara Jones of One2One Network, Renee Ross of Cutie Booty Cakes, and Amy Lupold Bair of Resourceful Mommy. (Amy gave Amy Clark of Mom Advice’s presentation since she couldn’t make it due to a death in the family.)

While Amy’s presentation Securing the Best and Brightest Bloggers for Your Campaigns was aimed at PR reps and brand managers, there was some good advice about what bloggers should be doing to attract brands’ attention and business.

Amy advises that they look at your numbers, community and the information on your blog. These are all measures of your influence. Here’s what you should be reviewing:

The numbers

• Traffic: How many visitors do you have? (Others can guess at your traffic through Compete, Quantcast which also give demographic info, Alexa and Technorati without asking you for your numbers. You can measure traffic yourself through Google Analytics.)
• Twitter: Are you on Twitter? How many followers do you have ? How many lists are you on? Are you updating frequently? How are you engaging other Twitter users? Are you participating in Twitter parties? Are you discussing the brands you want to work with?
• Facebook Fan Page: Have you set one up for your blog? If so, how many followers do you have? How often do you update it? (Here is a post from Mashable that show you how to create a fan page: HOW TO: Set Up a Winning Facebook Fan Page.)

Other numbers Amy didn’t mention are your RSS feed readership and your e-newsletter list numbers.

Your community

• Are people commenting on your site?
• Are you providing different types of content like a Facebook Fan Page, videos, podcasts, and online forums?  Three other forms of content that Amy didn’t mention are ebooks, downloads (for example activity sheets for kids) and enewsletters.
• Does your community align with the brands you want to attract? If not, how can you fix that?

Your informational pages:

• Do you have a comprehensive About page that shows PR and marketing peoples who you are?
• Does your Review Policy Page explain what kind of products and services you are interested in reviewing?

Other measures of your influence:

• Are you attending social media and blogging conferences and blogger meet ups? This shows how seriously you take your blogging and how much you interface in real life with your community.
• What other brands are you working with? Have you been invited to mom blogger events? This shows that other brands are interested in you.
• Are you speaking at conferences or teaching social media and blogging classes? This shows your expertise.
• Have you created a LinkedIn profile? A good LinkedIn profile can show off your experience and work background. It’s also a great way for companies to find you.

Next steps

• Analytics
• Informational Pages

Anne-Marie Nichols is the Social Media Manager at Mom Central Consulting. You can also find her blogging up some healthy recipes at This Mama Cooks!

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