Je suis Palin

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

In the aftermath of the the slaying of the French satirists, collectively known as Charlie Hedbos, the global netizen’s response was to adopt Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie) tag, photos, t-shirts to show solidarity with the right of free speech. While Je suis Charlie remains the most influential Facebook group in this respect, the second most powerful global influencer is a left field surprise. More influential than Fox News, Daily Mails, Huffington Post, or even L’Express, is Sarah Palin's use of the issue to attack Barack Obama’s absence from the public parade of world leaders.

Source: QSearch Trend

While Sarah Palin’s post was not influential over time, its one day attack had 96K likes and one out of three readers shared the article. Her ability to engage and influence is vastly greater than the established media outlet. The comparison between Fox News and Sarah Palin is particularly interesting because both influencers have similar influential profile; provocation.

The traditional method of measuring influence is to look at the ‘Likes’ each group has. Fox News has 10 million Likes. Sarah Palin has 4.4 million Likes. Under the old “more Like equals more influence” worldview, we expect Fox News to have twice the influence of Palin. But Fox News only has 73K likes, and 10K shares. One out of 13 shared, vs 1 out of 3 for Palin. Clearly, Palin has a much higher quality audience than Fox News, despite her audience is only half of Fox News’.

Before advance metric are available, advertisers would settle for group with the larger audience number. With advance analytics such as QSearch, we can now measure the quality of the audience, that includes engagement level of a group, multiply by its group size, and the secondary transmission of its sharing.

Before engaging an influencer to promote your message, measure the intensity of their audience. Social media is evolving to the the point where the quality of the audience is measurable and sometimes more important than the quality of the influencer.

Mark Twain had a great saying, “It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.” When you can measure both the size of the dog and the size of the fight, you can confidently decide which one to apply the lipstick to.

Written by Roger Do