Users are more than just a number. That’s been the knock against social influence analyzers like Klout and Kred, which assign users an influencer score based on their social media profiles. But both companies are in the midst of moving away from the score. Last week, Klout began pushing a major redesign oriented around what CEO Joe Fernandez described to Adweek as a user’s “social resume.” Now, Kred is also propping up the content that bolsters a user’s score with Kred Story.
Like an analytics-driven version of social dashboard Rebelmouse, Kred Story arrays a user’s Twitter posts into a dashboard that appends the number of retweets a given post received. Users can then click on the post to see a selection of who retweeted it. Kred Stories are outfitted with other boxes to augment a Twitter user’s profile. One box highlights the user’s influence and outreach scores (the number of social interactions a user receives and initiates, respectively, as measured by Kred). Another displays a word cloud of hashtags included in Twitter conversations involving the user. Others show the user’s top locations, community categories and others who mentioned or were mentioned by the user. Story viewers can scroll down the page to check out more popular posts in reverse-chronological order.
“The next version of Kred takes it beyond being just a number,” said Kred CEO Andrew Grill, who described Kred Story as a user’s “visual stream of influence.” At launch, the most retweeted or shared content tops a user’s Kred Story, but Grill said users would soon be able to pin individual posts atop the page.
In addition to specific Twitter accounts, users can search for Kred Stories tied to a hashtag. In those cases, the Kred Story presents popular posts that include the hashtag as well as the number of tweets and retweets featuring it. The Kred Story also displays a word cloud with other words most often mentioned with the hashtag.
But it’s not just Twitter handles and hashtags that have Kred Stories. Kred has added community categories such as advertising, technology and shopping, and broken out subcategories for individual books, movies and TV shows. The pitch to brands is that they can use Kred Story to see not only what people are saying about a given topic but also who are the most influential individuals on that subject.
Powering Kred Story is Kred’s access to the Twitter firehose that lets it mine any and all tweets in real time. Kred has had access to the Twitter firehose since November 2008, and since that time has analyzed 100 billion tweets, said Grill. Kred also has access to Facebook—though Kred Story is very Twitter-centric—and Grill is eyeing LinkedIn and Google+ as the next social networks to integrate by the end of this year.
