Every content creator, especially one hoping to become an influencer, knows that strong numbers are the gateway to social media popularity. While content is still king, fame on the internet is only possible with the right numbers, and getting to that point is a growth process and as it is often said, you can only grow what you measure.

This phenomenon is why analytics has become a must-have component for every social media platform, offering users an insight into how their posts perform; which kind of posts get more engagement and which don’t get any at all, which user segment gives them the most engagement and who isn’t part of their audience.

In a bid to measure all of these, users often have to rely on 3rd party apps or move from one social media app to the other, looking through a lot of numbers, sometimes not knowing what the most important metric should be or how their numbers stack compared to those of social media users they admire.

Recently, Plaqad, a marketing technology firm from Lagos launched a social media ranking tool called SocialCred, which takes a slightly different approach to measuring social media numbers.

SocialCred is a web app designed to rank a user’s influence across 3 major social media networks - Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. The app combines measuring the usual metrics such as engagement rate and the number of followers, with ranking them, as a way of putting those numbers into perspective and making them more tangible. Everyone who uses the app gets assigned a rank simply based on the app’s four key data points.

Number of Followers
Although many users on social media now adopt fraudulent ways to increase their follower count, it is still a very important metric that brands look at when choosing content creators to work with. This is because it determines the potential direct reach that a content creator has. Once a social media account on any of the three platforms SocialCred measures is linked, the app accurately shows what the follower or subscriber figure on the account is, down to the last number. Rather than the usual abbreviated number that is shown on most social media apps, SocialCred shows the numbers in full, no estimates. Having a way to show how many of those followers are really active might be the only thing missing from this metric.

Average Audience Sentiment
With this data point, the SocialCred platform seems to make up for the lapses of its follower count. The audience sentiment measures how a content creator’s social media audience reacts or is most likely to react to their posts. SocialCred presents this in percentages divided into 3 segments; positive, neutral, and negative. This metric is great as it provides a content creator with the right insight into the minds of their followers and answers the question of whether they like what they share or not. Not everyone would like a user’s content, at least not always, but it is better to have more people on the positive than the negative. However, while having many neutral followers might not seem as bad as having too many on the negative, it is definitely a call to action to the content creator to do more to move them to the positive.

Original Post VS Retweet Ratio
The most successful online influencers are content creators, and their huge earnings are usually tied to how well they can infuse a brand in their content. This is why this metric from SocialCred is vital. This measures how much of the content on a creator’s account is owned by them i.e original content, and compares it to the number of other creators’ content they have shared over a 30-day period.

A brand looking to work with an influencer will consider this crucial because it tells them a story of how effective the creator’s originality is. It doesn’t take away the fact that the curation of quality content is also a good strategy for keeping one’s online audience meaningfully engaged.

Average Engagement Ratio
This metric is probably the most important of the four because it measures the average engagement a user receives per post they put out on their social media pages. It is measured in percentage and covers a 30-day period. In the influencer marketing space, brands either choose a content creator solely for their large audience or strictly for the engagement they drive within a niche or a wider group. It is mostly the latter these days.

Of course, any user can check their engagement numbers from their social media app’s dashboard, but it’s often presented in a format that can appear confusing or cumbersome as it includes everything from comments to shares, retweets even likes, but using a percentage as SocialCred does makes it a lot easier.

Having all of these metrics detailed in very simple terms is one part that makes using the SocialCred app fun, but the larger fun comes from the type of ranks each content creator might get when they try to measure themselves. It could be anything from JJC to Trendsetter or A-Lister. Other ranks include Learner, Crowd Controller, Big Shot, and Socialite. The ranks, of course, suggest that a user can move from one rank to the next if they put in the hard work, and that’s definitely a strategy that can get a content creator to work.

Although people say that comparison is the thief of joy, the fact that SocialCred allows users to compare themselves with other users is a plus for the app. In today’s social media world, people are constantly looking to creatively copy and this feature gives the right basis for that, as it shows an intention towards growth.

The best part of the app remains its simplicity as that alone makes everything fun, and ensures that anyone using the app doesn’t feel like that are at their wit’s end, doing some hardcore analyst’s work, rather they are in a playful mood viewing stats that are not hard to comprehend.