We all like to know the score. We want to measure our sales, our margins, our revenue, growth and progress. Keeping score is part of our DNA.
As this relates to your social networking status, there are several web tools that I recommend to help you measure your current position, and also to track your progress along the path you have chosen. If you really want to know where your Twitter and Facebook strategies are getting you, one of the most effective web tools to use is Klout.
Klout is not a ranking tool based simply on how many followers or fans you have. Klout tracks the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your entire social geography. By collecting data about the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of your network they apply analytics to discover what they call “indicators of influence. They do not stop there. Once your Klout score is calculated (it can take an hour or more to do this) they provide you a breakdown of your score in the following three categories:
- True Reach
- Amplification Score
- Network Score
These categories are then broken down into these individual sections:
- Influence Matrix-showing your position in a quadrant chart and what general type of user you are, along with those that influence you and those that you influence.
- Content Analysis-your most influential topics.
- Klout Score-a measurement of your overall online influence.
- True Reach-size of your engaged audience.
- Amplification-the likelihood that your content will be acted upon.
- Network-Influence level of your engaged audience.
- Topics-most influential topics.
- Tweets-top retweets listed and their possible reach.
- Sharing-your most popular shared links.
Overall, Klout is an influence metric, measuring overall influence via twenty five variables. For a detailed description of what Klout measures and what they look for, click here.
This tool is not for the faint of heart. I found that some of my online activities were not as beneficial as I had thought. By using the information provided in my Klout report, I have been able to begin moving my overall score up noticeably each week over the last two several weeks. You can update your report every 5 days, so that by running your Klout report every five days, you can map your progress or lack thereof-there I go again with wanting to measure everything.
I am learning how to get more out of my social networking efforts and I hope you will benefit from using Klout as well. For the record, here is my score as of 09/13/2010.
