The social influence of tweeters and bloggers in Middle East is playing a vital role in shaping the society, whether it’s by initiating a social movement, influencing to buy a new product and people turning to them for latest news.

When you’re embarking on a campaign, one of the most important goals is finding social media influencers. If you can get relevant and well known influencers behind, it gives your campaign an invaluable edge. For increasing influence, one needs to reach out to more people and encourage them to listen to your views, engage in conversations, make informed and regular posts and focus more on something that they want to read. The Trust Barometer states that 77% of people refused to buy products or services from a company they distrusted. Trust can be measured by the number of times someone is happy to associate what you have said through them – in other words, how often you are retweeted. It can be increased by creating interest about yourself – people like to see ‘behind the scenes’ and a blog is a chance to demonstrate that experience and expertise.

The only problem is that how do you go about finding the influencers who are relevant your market and do you even know where to start looking?

To make your life easier, we developed and recently launched a tool and 2.0 version. These tools give a broad overview of an individual’s social media popularity as a whole, trend, topics and news (e.g. Egypt’s uprising, Dubai’s financial crisis, etc.). Most of the current tools for measuring influence focus either on Twitter and Facebook and ignore other online activities like blogging. We can consier influence more holistically. For example, it’s clear that blogs are more influential when their content is search-optimized and discussed in social media channels like Twitter, so those are metrics we’ve built into BlogLevel.

Both tools offer practical intelligence for companies and brands, using a proprietary algorithm that employs forty different metrics to track and score bloggers and tweeters in any language and country. When you’re searching for a specific topic, below is a list of major information provided:

  • Online buzz volume around the topic.
  • Relevant influencers on the topic.
  • Relevant phrases around the topic, that people are discussing.
  • Share of voice on the topic by relevance.
  • Relevant web links that are most shared.
  • Highlights what a specific tweeter or blogger is talking about, who they influence and who are they influenced by.
  • Tips to individual tweeters and bloggers on how to improve their influence, popularity, engagement and trust.

According to TweetLevel and BlogLevel, below are the influence scores of 10 influential Middle East tweeters, bloggers and websites:

Some of the Most Influential Tweeters in the Middle East:

Some of the Most Influential Bloggers and Websites:

The initial result of these new tools helps illustrate the ongoing influence of traditional media as part of the influencer landscape in the Middle East. Looking at the results of this specially developed algorithm allows users to identify the sources of news that create unique ideas, which are then amplified. BlogLevel and TweetLevel track content in any language, which allows users to quickly compare and analyse the influence of sources across the Middle East.