6 Easy Steps to Become An Influencer

#1 – Identify Your Focus Areas. What are the key topics of interest to you and the people and companies in your industry? My own key topics are “open innovation” and “social media”. I spent lots of time tracking this and especially the intersection between this.

#2 – Create a Twitter Account. Twitter is your key tool for becoming an influencer so you need to get familiar with Twitter. You will soon learn that a desktop application such as TweetDeck is great for filtering the Twitter information overload.

#3 – Setup Content Channels. You need to find all relevant information on your focus areas. Three easy ways of doing this is to 1) setup your searches on TweetDeck, 2) setup your searches on Google Alerts and 3) visit Alltop frequently to get an idea of good blogs

#4 – Become a Curator and Start Sharing. Spend a few weeks getting familiar with the many content channels that you have created and then start sharing (on Twitter) what you find of value. You should be able to send 5-50 relevant tweets everyday. It will take time, but soon other people will start following you and thus your influence is increasing.

#5 – Track Your Progress. Check out Klout. This is a service that measures our social media influence. To some, this will be a bit scary and creepy, but this is where we are headed. Nevertheless, it gives you a good tool to measure your progress beyond the mere number of Twitter followers.

#6 – Improve and Expand. Continue to improve your key words and content channels. Once you are familiar with Twitter, you might also want to look into how service media tools such as LinkedIn, Quora, SlideShare, FaceBook – and many others can help you become an influencer. At this time, you are perhaps also ready to start creating your own original content and start blogging about this…

6 Easy Steps to Become An Influencer | 15inno