Earlier this month, Fast Company magazine launched an experiment called The Influence Project with the goal of discovering the most influential people online. The part that’s fun for everyone is the guarantee that all participants—not just the most influential ones—will have their “picture appear in the November issue of Fast Company magazine as part of an amazing photo spread," where those with the most influence will have the biggest pictures. We signed up immediately.

What’s cool about the project is that it’s concerned with both reach and depth. In other words, the project acknowledges that the most influential online personalities aren’t simply the most popular ones. Those who exercise the most influence are also those with the most loyal followings.

Fortunately, the project is great at tracking loyalty and ranking participants based on the number of people who directly click on their unique URL, which also happens to be the primary measure of influence. Thus, the basic idea is that anyone who clicks your link will help spread your influence, and you’ll move up the ranks accordingly. So far, we’ve been in the competition for less than a week, and we’re already in the top 5% of participants. Out of 20,946 participants, we’re number 985.

If you don’t participate in this contest, however, your brand can still learn from it. One major lesson for your brand to take away is that social media success depends just as much on depth as it does on reach. If your brand gets a lot of people to go its Facebook page only to find that most users redirect someplace other than your homepage, your brand needs some new web tactics. On the flipside, if great content on your Facebook fan page can transform your brand’s fans into evangelists, that’s great—but if there are too few people viewing the content, you're not in the best position, either.

You can avoid both dead ends to this problem by creating an editorial calendar so that you’re on top of your social media strategy. By regularly updating your social media accounts and posting information to various blogs and forums, your brand can constantly stay fresh and look cool.

It can be difficult to write fresh bits for social media on a weekly basis. However, strategy sessions with a marketing agency that specializes in social media can help your brand deliver consistent topical content that generates a response from your target audience.

Many brands start to succeed by showing consumers content that's related to the brand rather than content that's about the brand. When this is done right, consumers understand brand interaction as advice-giving, caring, or simply brightening up a consumer’s day. Like writing literature, however, it’s important to keep in mind the rule that having the ability to write anything doesn’t mean that anything you write will make an impact.

If you really want to be influential, think before you start typing.