In June 2013, we helped FINN Public Relations agency to establish its 2013 ranking of most influential Belgian journalists on twitter. During this process, a challenge led us to evaluate how Kred and peerIndex compare to Klout.
Extracting data
First, we extracted 1500+ twitter accounts from various twitter lists. Then Finn refined the results, keeping only journalists.
Influence on twitter
Then we got the influence scores each person in the list from Klout, the leading social media influence measurement tool.
Problem
Klout scores are not only based on twitter activity. Klout registered users can link other social profiles (facebook, linkedIn ...) which affects the score. FINN wanted to rank only on twitter influence.
Looking around...
So, we had a look at Klout\'s competitors and compared them to what Klout provides. Both Kred and peerIndex provide a twitter-only score. We had to validate how accurate they were, compared to the Klout measure.
Adding Kred & peerIndex to the mix
Kred seemed to provide higher scores than Klout for our dataset, whereas peerIndex assigned relatively lower scores.
Podiums comparison
The top 5 journalists for each system were not exactly the same, though some faces are common to all three lists.
Removing peerIndex from the equation
Because many journalists were missing from peerIndex, we discarded it.
Kred / Klout correlation
Next we studied correlation between the Kred and Klout scores.
Why we chose Kred for the ranking
The high rank correlation coefficient between Klout and Kred shows that Kred is a suitable replacement for Klout in our study; Hence this system was chosen, with the implications on the ranking. You can find FINN\'s ranking and other interesting results in FINN\'s Blog.
This is the second of two articles in a series about social media and influence. First part reviews the key concepts and issues around social media influence.