PeerIndex hits 45 million profiles tracked, aims to out-clout Klout

The race to create the gold standard of measurement for social media influence continues. The last we heard from Klout was that it was now tracking around 60 million profiles. But today it would appear PeerIndex is in its rear view mirror with 45 million profiles and counting.

PeerIndex, which identifies experts who use social media like Twitter to expound on their chosen topics, is effectively building an opinion former marketing service which lets marketers and brands access these highly influential individuals.

While Klout gives us an overall score for an individuals’ influence, PeerIndex goes after the actual subjects people are expert in and ranks them accordingly with a proprietary algorithm. They say that avoids brands using social media to target the wrong people. This is all part of the brave new world knownn as “opinion former marketing” – something I slightly shudder to even repeat, but it does appear to be a growing sector.

Azeem Azhar, CEO of PeerIndex, says “With 45 million users we are covering pretty much every twitter user with influence within a certain field. Whilst there are something like 175 million users in total the vast majority of these are either inactive or are just followers rather than tweeters.”

This also suggests that Twitter may have a much lower number of active users, as others have suggested.

Peer Index pivoted from its previous incarnation as ViewsFlow last year.

The startup is privately backed by leading European angels and executives including Sherry Coutu, Stefan Glaenzer (formerly of Last.fm), Bill Emmott (former Editor in Chief of The Economist), Ab Banerjee (former CEO of Raw Communications), Simon Gibson, Anthemis and Nauiokas Park.

Update: It’s worth mentioning Traackr is also a competitor to Klout and PeerIndex.