If you don't know what Klout is, it's an easy way to keep track of a variety of different social media metrics. It's very consumer-friendly, but it actually helps analyse quite a few different aspects of your social media profile that would otherwise be difficult to study.You can use it to combine your Twitter and Facebook activities into one overall rating from 1 to 100, but I just use it for Twitter, where I'm most active for personal and work reasons alike.
Score Analysis
My overall Klout score is a measure of how well I am performing on Twitter - how many followers I have, how influential they are, how frequently I am mentioned and retweeted. It's easy to imagine the impact that a particularly good Follow Friday might have on this, or a single tweet that is retweeted by a large number of people. Mostly I hover around the 50 mark, which is not bad for an individual who's not famous.
My overall Klout score is a measure of how well I am performing on Twitter - how many followers I have, how influential they are, how frequently I am mentioned and retweeted. It's easy to imagine the impact that a particularly good Follow Friday might have on this, or a single tweet that is retweeted by a large number of people. Mostly I hover around the 50 mark, which is not bad for an individual who's not famous.
Network Influence
This is a metric I'm pretty pleased with. Network Influence looks at the people you interact most often with, and compares their Klout score with yours. In my case, it shows that the people I consider friends on Twitter are relatively powerful - I'm in good company, and seemingly producing the kind of content that catches their eye.
I'm a bit of an elitist in life in general, so although my Twitter friends are a bit of a motley crue, it's nice to know that, in this context at least, I'm keeping the right company. The aim is obviously to gradually become as influential as they are.
Amplification Probability
This is the above put into action. It's about how often my content is retweeted - for being particularly funny, or interesting, or unusual. Even with a small cohort of followers, if one influential individual retweets you, you're in with a good chance of reaching a larger group. In my case I quite often get retweeted by minor celebrities - such as Jenny Frost, who has over 15,000 followers, or Katie Waissel who has nearly 150,000 at the time of writing.
What it means for you
It's all well and good, but what can it actually do for your social media campaign? Well, it's a good-looking graphical way to track your progress - to see who's influential among your followers and how many people are really seeing your tweets.
Klout also helps keep you on the right track - although it's not the be all and end all of social networking, it awards points for genuine interactions and not for simply tweeting into the darkness of a small, disengaged audience of passive followers.
You can see how well I'm doing on my Klout profile page.
