Do You Know Your Klout Score? Learn How To Raise Your Klout Score Because It Matters…

I’m the first to admit that I didn’t pay much attention to Klout when they first came on the scene. First of all, it took me a minute to even hear about them because I am very specific when it comes to my social media engagement. I don’t spend ridiculous amounts of time talking about every single thing my kids do (much to my family’s dismay:). Then when I got the word on them, I did my due diligence and conducted a little bit of research. Many of the experts said that in the grand scheme of things, Klout didn’t matter much. They were wrong.

Search engines such as heavy hitters Google and Bing now take in account a website’s social influence when deciding on authority and ranking, and Klout has now positioned themselves as  the measure of influence for all social media. In fact, in September Bing and Klout became strategic partners and so far Bing has included over 45,000 experts into their search results and the number is estimated to grow. Next may be you!

Source: WebProNews

Klout Basics: How Do They Come Up With Our Klout Score?

According to the folks at Klout, they measure our social influence using three specific metrics and how many followers you have is the least important metric, while engagement is the highest metric. Here they are:

True Reach – the size of your engaged audience
Amplification Probability – the likelihood your content provokes an action
Network Influence – the influence level of your engaged audience

The average Klout score is around 40 and if you have a score of 60 and above you’re doing really well.  Celebrities like Justin Beiber have scores in the 90s! I decided to do a little more research around this topic, so that I could raise my own Klout score which at the time of the writing is at 58 and so that you can raise yours as well. Let’s work together – okay? Here’s what we’re going to do:

Step 1 – Connect All Accounts

Our score is calculated based on social reach so it’s important that we include all of our social networks, not just Facebook and Twitter. Klout currently supports: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Last.fm, and Flickr. (I see a few that I haven’t connected to my account yet.)

Step 2 – Update Regularly

Klout scores are heavily influenced by ReTweets (RTs), @replies, Facebook Likes, Google Pluses, and viral content shares. The best way to assure that people share your content is to write fresh, high quality content and give people ample opportunities to share it. This means that when I publish an article, I need to share that link to the article on my social profiles more than once so that I’m reaching all the people in my network. People use social media at different times. You’ll have to test this out in your network to find your social sharing “sweet spots”. (This is an area that I can continue to work on.)

Step 3 – Create An Influencer Group

Organize a group of your friends, fellow bloggers, or accountability buddies and agree to share, like, and retweet each other’s content on various social media sites. This group doesn’t have to be big at all, it just has to be comprised of folks who are going to participate and support you and vice-versa. I do this online with a few of my online pals in a private Facebook group. (I could probably add another person to the group but I want to be sure not to make it too big and/or overwhelming for the group members.)

Step 4 – Participate In Chats

Interesting fact: Klout gives value to RTs, @replies and Google Plus votes, at a higher rate than most other voting signals. A great way to influence these metrics are to participate in live Twitter chats, Google+ Hangouts, or engage in popular multi-reply discussions on Facebook. (This is something I totally don’t do, but will definitely put on my marketing agenda.)

Step 5 – Give People Permission To Engage

This is so simple that you may not have thought about doing it, but I saw a marketer do this somewhere in her marketing funnel (I can’t remember where), and I said “Damn that was simple!” So I started doing it. In my newsletters, I don’t just add the social media icons in the template, but I ask subscribers to comment or like something specifically. After subscribers sign up and get their free ebook publishing guide from me, I ask them to Tweet about or share it on Facebook – and guess what? They do. Give people permission to engage with you and to share your content — and they will. (As I write this, I am thinking of other areas where I need to be more diligent about this. I think this is one of the simplest areas where we as entrepreneurs can increase our Klout scores for sure.)

Last bit: If you’ve found that this article has value, I’d appreciate you sharing it with your networks and use one of the buttons below to Like, Tweet, and give it a Google+ vote. I seriously appreciate it. Thanks and I’ll see you over there:)

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Lisa Angelettie

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I make a living writing, ePublishing, and marketing books and teaching others how to do the same. I have one mission: To turn you into the best writer that you can be while enjoying every minute of it!

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