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One of the biggest values of social media is that it allows you to advertise, very quickly to a lot of people, all the things you want to shout about but can’t fit in the small advert you can just about afford in the local rag.
Your website, blog, online social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, are all hugely valuable and - moreso than print advertising - much more measurable. Statistical services like Google Analytics and Statcounter provide analysis of your website and blog activities (and can, therefore, also provide some tracking of the success of your advertising in the traditional media too), while services such as Hootsuite track the response to your links that you might post on sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
But despite this, and the myriad of followers, friends and fans you might have across your various online presences, do you really know how influential you are to the people who see your messages? Have you, as they might say, got Klout?
“The Standard for Influence,” shouts Klout’s strapline, an online service that, once linked to your social media services, monitors how your performance online is being received.
Formed in 2007, Klout - www.klout.com - believes that it isn’t just the famous and the political who have the ability to influence people’s thoughts and preferences, but everybody who is using the power of the Internet to share ideas and information.
The Klout score, therefore, is a measure of your “overall online influence,” with a rank from 1 to 100 and is made up of a multiple of variables based on your online activities. Right now, Klout takes its information from Twitter and Facebook - the two most popular online social sites - with connections to LinkedIn and FourSquare coming soon. As such sites grow in popularity, Klout will be able to grow with them.
The beauty of Klout is that it provides you with an instant, easily understandable measure of your business activities online, broken down in to categories like True Reach (the size of your engaged audience), Amplification Probability (the likelihood that your tweets and statuses will be acted upon) and Network Influence (based upon the number of retweets, messages and links clicked).
It’s all put together in a nice, simple, bold and orange display that lets you quickly see how your performance over the past thirty days has been, and what information has been the most influential. Klout then breaks you down in to a particular Style that it has seen you build during your online activities: I, apparently, have a score of 48 and am a ‘Socializer’. Not bad, for an introvert like me...
Having an online presence for pubs, bars and restaurants has never been more important and a service like this can quickly help you understand how valuable your online marketing is to your business, and what is being responded to well by your followers.
I combine Klout with Hootsuite to give me business intelligence in to how my links to blogs, articles and news stories are responded to, and - because I use Google Chrome - I’ve added an extension to my browser so that I can quickly see in Twitter what sort of Klout score the people I like reading have also got.
Klout then. It’s like getting graded at school, but more fun. The higher your score, the more people are engaged by your news...
Mark Daniels is the licensee at the Tharp Arms in Chippenham, near Newmarket
