Lion's ROAR Marketing

And That’s What Klout is All About

With the size of the social media realm growing astronomically every day and the average day consisting of 140 million tweets (which translates into over 1 billion per week!) it may be hard to figure out how much of footprint you leave when using social media, especially Twitter.  You may think, “How will my voice ever be heard with so much clutter out there?”  Meet Klout; the gold standard of measuring your impact on Twitter.

I originally stumbled upon Klout by reading a post on Social Media Examiner that touched on this awesome tool.  So a little bit about Klout.  Founded by Joe Fernandez in 2007, Klout was developed as a tool to help the individual know where they stand compared to other Twitter entities out there.  Klout’s mission is “to help every individual understand and leverage their influence.”

As long as you have Twitter account you can easily visit Klout and enter your username to find out your “Klout Score.” Your Klout Score comprises of three main components.  They are the following:

  • Amplification: The likelihood your content will be acted upon.  Contributing factors for this component include retweets and @ mentions.
  • Network: Influence level of your engaged audience.  Contributing factors for this component relate more to people outside your network, so unique senders, unique retweeters and of course new followers and messages.
  • True Reach: Size of your engaged audience.  Klout understands that spammers and bogus accounts may follow you but they take them out of the equation to analyze your True Reach and who of the legit followers you are connected with…truly.

What’s also great about Klout is if you go to your Dashboard, Klout shows you Big Players already following, that you are not following.  See below:

In addition, ways to amplify your Klout score is connecting to your other various social networks (Facebook and LinkedIn) to supplement other components of your Klout Score.  This feature can also be found on your Dashboard and will look like this:

Two other great things about Klout is that it’s free to use and overall this tool allows you to have actual results pertaining to your social media activities.  A major issue that is hot in the social media world is accountability and measuarability of your Return on Investment.  What are your efforts actually conveying and who are you making an impact with?  Klout helps address this issue and shows you areas which you can improve your efforts and leverage your existing ones.

My Klout Score is bubbling 21 but I hope to have it continue to grow.  It first started off as a 9.  Klout also has various classifications for the what you are identified as in the Twittersphere.  But you should visit http://klout.com to find out more.  So jump on the Klout bandwagon and start finding out where you measure up compared to other Tweeters.  Happy Klouting!