Influencer analysis has really come into it’s own in the last 12 months and I see this being a huge growth industry in 2011. A few weeks back I highlighted Klout’s push to be come the default influence analysis grader online and now, thanks to Brian Solis, I’ve since tried out PeerIndex, which does a very similar thing.

Although their business model looks to be based around selling access to influencer lists, PeerIndex has set up sample rankings for various topics, such as environmental issues. It’s quite cute – though obviously you don’t get to see under the hood.

I looked at their social media influencer list and, although it only showed a sample of 5 of the top 50 most influential people discussing social media, I was still a little disappointed (see above). Although the people mentioned definitely have credentials, I wouldn’t have picked any of them in my top 50. Maybe that’s the beauty of it. Maybe machines are better than mankind after all. Maybe.

And then there’s PostRank Connect, which looks fascinating and aims to do a similar thing (though I haven’t tried it personally, yet) and a “nifty little service cooked up by Edelman” called TweetLevel, which does pretty much what Klout does, but without the fanfare.

These tools are obviously limited to gauging online influence, rather than absolute influence, but they still provide a useful service in sifting through the millions of content spammers, plagiarists, snake oil salesmen and self publicists you’ll find clogging up the cyberwaves. Traackr also provides a similar service to the paid version of PeerIndex and I’ve heard good things about the results.

The standard business alternative to these free or paid influencer analysis tools is to pay an agency to analyse an industry for you and provide a list of the top 50 influencers – at a cost upwards of $20k . Evidently, this is ludicrous if your industry is likely to have influencers online, which the majority of industries today do.

There is an alternative though: simply to get online and start interacting with the movers and shakers in a specific industry yourself. Set up a few Twitter keyword searches or get a low-cost monitoring tool (Uvbervu or ViralHeat) and do the same. Within a few weeks of genuine engagement you’ll soon start identifying the online infuencers. Importantly, you’ll have bridged the chasm that influencer tools leave you staring at – i.e.  how to actually engage with the influencers once you’ve identified them. After all, what use is knowing someone’s important if you can’t connect with them?

Trackle's social media monitoring dashboard

Here’s a list of 8 free (or very cheap) social media monitoring tools we’ve tried out in the last few weeks. They are all pretty light-touch, but great for anyone starting out in social media monitoring – and a lot of fun into the bargain. (We also reviewed 5 top budget social media monitoring tools a few months back).

1) Trackle - Trackle started out as newsletter service, enabling anyone to create a free email newsletter on any topic, which would then be automatically created from web content and delivered regularly. They also offer a corporate version which includes a basic social media monitoring tool, which delivers daily updates to your inbox. The interface is quite cluttered and confusing, but it seems to work reasonably well (though some blog results weren’t captured in my test). There’s a rather nice “credibility” filter, which you can use to pinpoint the comments/posts from influential authors – though I’m not sure what basis this is judged on. Trackle offers a 30 day free trial, but it’s only $9.99 afterwards anyway. Within that price you can track 10 keywords/phrases. The Premium version is $99 for unlimited keywords.

2) TweepSearch - I recently wrote about Tweepsearch as a tool for finding influencers on Twitter very enthusiastically. The service enables you to analyse your Twitter followers to find out who’s influential on which topics. If you like playing with Boolean search queries to get really interesting results, it’s the Twitter Profile monitoring tool for you.

3) FollowerWonk – Just when I thought I’d found the best Twitter monitoring tool (see above), Marshall Sponder trumped me somewhat with followerwonk.com. It searches Twitter profiles for keywords in the same way as Tweepsearch, albeit with an easier interface (there’s a handy field for entering locations, rather than having to use search terms) but it produces the results in a more comprehensive way. As a result, one of the nicest features (which probably isn’t intended) is that you can easily copy and paste the results into a spreadsheet.

4) Klout - One of the most user-friendly and, dare I say it, more serious Twitter “influence monitoring” tools on the market is Klout.com. You can search for a specific topic and it gives you a list of the most influential Twitter users based on (what looks like) some fairly sophisticated mapping of their connectedness and ability to instigate re-tweets and mentions. If you put your Twitter details in Klout will use the same calculations to decide if you’re a Casual, Connector, Climber or Persona (with Persona’s being both connected AND influential).

5) Realmon9 – This one’s in the list on its pure potential alone. It’s still in Beta, but it’s a social media monitoring Google App. – which means, you can use it (for free) with any Google account. You can currently view a demo (you need to sign into your Google account to view it) and email to request a full account, but it looks to offer quite comprehensive listings. The developer, AJ Chen, is already working on plugging the app into Salesforce.com, to enable end-to-end CRM (the kind Radian6 and others are striving towards). One to watch!

6) Tweetreach – Not new, but still a great site for blowing away Twitter sceptics in a single click. Just add a short URL from a popular Tweet you’ve recently posted, click the button and it shows you how many people (and who) your Tweet was sent to. Great for identifying who your most valuable and viral Followers are.

7) Cligs – This short URL company offers social media monitoring in a really simple and elegant way. Paste in your long URL and it gives you a nice short version, plus an HTML version and an HTML one with a title, if you want it. In addition to the usual number of hits, Cligs gives you the times of hits, geographical location of visitors, which search engine bots have found your “clig”, Twitter and FriendFeed mentions, blog and comment links, Delicious bookmarks, plus, interestingly referral statistics – i.e. which links sent you traffic. The big problem for short URL companies is that Twitter uses bit.ly. To get around this Cligs offers apps and plugins for Gmail, iGoogle, Firefox, WordPress and TwitterFeed. It’s a first step for short URL social media monitoring – but I can see this area developing.

8) Ubervu – Ubervu’s social media comparison site lets you see how you’re ranking against your competitors in terms of social media reach and impact. It’s basically like Compete.com, but for social media. Ubervu’s main product is a freemium social media monitoring tool which is well worth a try. It’s quite powerful, but takes a bit of getting used to.

Interested in learning how to monitor social media? Tickets are on sale now for our social media monitoring master-class: Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, 31st March 2010, London (UK)