Continuing with my focus on all things Twitter, I’ve just found a new tool!
High on my agenda for March was: Build a Twitter following. Discovering tools that might support me in this task has been exhausting – there are so many of them! But, today I’ve got Klout …
Klout, to put it simply, “measures influence across the social web.“ Launched a year ago, at SXSW Interactive 2009, Klout currently has (according to Compete) just over 90,000 unique visitors per month.
One of Klout’s features is that it can be used to identify top influencers by topic; “… to find the people the world listens to.“ For example, entering “Social Media“, presents the Klout’s list of Top Influencers to follow:
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The essential component of this list is the Klout Score. This number, between 1 and 100, represents “the size and strength of a your sphere of influence on Twitter.“ Klout’s claim is that by using more than 25 factors, based on reach (number of followers), engagement (how many @ replies you receive), and velocity (how often your messages get re-tweeted) it can identify “your ability to drive people to action” – to reply, to retweet, or to click on a link in your tweet …
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The example below is the Klout score for Michael Fauscette (Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions, IDC. With LinkedIn Bio, “Senior software executive and industry analyst with worldwide expertise in developing profitable, scalable fast growth organizations” – and, yet he only scores 46!):
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So, Fauscette, to improve his score, will have to up his Demand (“engage with others”), and Engagement (build “relationships through conversation”).
Further, Klout places Fauscette as a Connector in it’s Connector-Persona-Casual-Climber grid:
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And, as for me? Well Klout has identified me as a Climber – in the bottom right corner of the quadrant. I’m “... building an audience and finding [my] voice.“ But, I need to engage “… more with others and [build] trust“, so that I can “move towards the upper right corner and then into the Persona quadrant“ … Heigh Ho!
