As far as readership and longevity is concerned, Like the Wind Magazine – our side project – is still in its infancy, having only just turned 1. But what about engagement and meaningful conversations with influencers? We were interested in comparing our social media reach on Twitter with two leading UK magazines, @trailrunningmag and @mensrunninguk.

In terms of twitter followers, we stand at just over 3K, while @mensrunninguk has got double our followers with >6K and @trailrunningmag towers over both of us with ten times as many (>30K).

However, what’s interesting is that in our test period (February 15 – March 17th), the number of mentions for all three magazines showed a very different picture: our ‘Mentions per Followers’ rate was 25% for Like the Wind, 7% for Men’s Running and only 2% for Trail Running Mag.

On our launch day only, our @likethewindmag handle was mentioned just under 300 times – which made us very happy, considering that our follower base was just 3,000 at the time.

This translates into a highly engaged community, but how influential are they?

There are several useful indicators for influence, such as whether your followers are considered influential (ie they have more followers than friends), whether they are active (when did they last tweet, how many tweets a day) etc, and we again Like the Wind scores higher than both other publications in all these areas.

This is only half of the picture though, as we are not yet reaching the same absolute number of people those publications reach. Since we’re 4 years behind the other two mags, it is only a matter of time until our audience combines the power of high reach with their higher levels of influence.