Klout.com Profile

What is Klout.com? Klout.com is a social media tool that measures your influence across the Web. For how Klout is calculated and how it measures your Twitter ranking, see below. The Klout Score gives a snapshot as to the popularity/influence of a user on Twitter.

Class of tool: Brand Monitoring

Other blog search engines: View the definitive list.

Cost: Free

What makes it different? It is unique in its niche, of Twitter influence monitoring.

Popularity: Alexa site ranking: 18,391 (worldwide traffic rank) with 308 sites linking in.

Who is using? Every major and even slightly important Twitter user.

Ease of use: Its just as simple as signing into your Twitter account.

Time to setup: A couple of minutes.

Time to maintain: None, once the account is setup. You might want to periodically check in and see if your rating is growing, or otherwise.

What you need to know: Integrates with Hootsuite, a Twitter client. Helps in evaluating who to follow and who can be dropped (or unfollowed).

Bottom line: The Klout Score is on a scale of 0 to 100 with 100 being the most influential. Your Klout is calculated with a combination of more than 25 variables. It analyzes the content of your tweets, who reads them and how they react to them.

Once your account is setup, you'll be able to see a huge amount of statistics on your account, and thus your influence.

Some of the available stats, aside from the Klout Score:

• Reach
• Demand
• Engagement
• Velocity
• Content Stats (over the past 30 days)
• Influence (growth or shrinkage over time)

The major categories that affect your Klout Score are:

1. True Reach
   • Reach: considers content quality and spread across Twitter
   • Demand: amount of people followed to reach current level of followers and reciprocation
2. Amplification Probability
   • Engagement: diversity of message sources and depth of conversations
   • Velocity: likelihood of re-tweets and variety of people doing that
   • Activity: frequency of tweets, and are these attracting new followers and re-tweets?
3. Network Score: Evaluates the influence of the people who interact with you.

These variables are run though an analytics program to create the Klout Score.

The result is a number, and also a placement on the influence graph, with 4 quadrants. Each quadrant is identified with a distinctive:

• Connector: Respected opinions and judgment among your sphere of influence. When you talk (or tweet) people listen.
• Persona: Either you are a famous person, or your very good at marketing yourself online. Its more than having a huge follower list - its about having a responsive audience.
• Casual: Twitter is not that important to your business. You gave it a try, and didn't go how you imagined. Maybe you're just getting started, or you just use Twitter as a news feed. Either way your tweets aren't affecting too many peoples lives.
• Climber: Going up? Your influence is gaining traction, and beginning to affect a larger crowd. The one drawback is that many spammers also fall into this category - with a large following, but without any one listening to them.

The Klout Score is not only a measure of how your marketing is doing - its also helps promote your profile and tweets right now. The better the score, the better chance of being found, being followed, and having a hearing ear. Klout.com is similar to Technorati, in that it provides a ranking, and as a result, popular accounts get rewarded in the search rankings.

If you're on Twitter, you better get on Klout.