This is a post from NRN content partner Eye Traffic, a Penton Marketing Services Company, and its Insight blog. The author is a senior media coordinator.
Identifying your key influencers on Twitter, blogs, forums and other social networks is key to gaining thought leadership and brand awareness. Here are some of my favorite resources:
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1. Alltop – This is a blog aggregator that lets you enter in keywords, and it will give you categories of blogs that fit that keyword. For instance, I entered “pool cleaning” as my keyword, and the categories were Home Improvement and DIY, which were right on target with the types of resources I was looking for.
2. Same Point – This resource helps you find specific posts on the keyword that you enter, which ultimately leads to influencers. I was able to find a lot of solid YouTube channels and Twitter handles through my search, and it also gives you other blogs and forum posts too.
3. Technorati – This resource is also for blogs. You can search a couple of ways: the first by entering a keyword for posts you’re looking for and it will result in specific blog posts. The other way to search is by going to the directory and searching by category. It gives you different specifications for ranking the blogs on authority.
4. WeFollow – This is for Twitter only, and you can search for influencers also by category. They have so many categories to choose from, and give you influential rates of the Twitter handles.
5. Delicious.com – This site is basically a sharing site, and allows you to search by category and by keyword. The results are posts that people have shared, but it’s cool because it also shows the tags that they use for the posts, so these can help with keyword formation for your research and just spark other ideas. A lot of the influencers I had found through manual research and through other sites showed up on here, so that was a good comparison.
6. Big Boards – This is strictly a forum directory which lets you search, again by keyword or by category. While I haven’t found that a lot of my gems I’ve already discovered are in here, it’s still a pretty good resource, and a good stepping stone if you need some help finding forums.
7. Social Mention – This site searches for all types of influential channels, including Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs. Enter in a keyword and results of specific posts will show up.