How To Raise Your Klout Score In 5 Steps

December 4, 2012 By Lisa Angelettie 9 Comments

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:)

5 Social Media Myths You Can’t Afford To Believe In!

June 14, 2012 By Lisa Angelettie 5 Comments

I was recently at a conference for very high level corporate women executives and entrepreneurs where I attended a social media breakout session. While I didn’t learn anything new personally, it was really interesting to see just how much other people didn’t know. So based on the questions of many of those executives and entrepreneurs, here were five assumptions that many of them made about social media which could be killing your business (and made me cringe!).

Myth #1 – Social Media Takes Entirely Too Much Time

This is what people use to think about blogging years ago (laugh! laugh!). So here’s the thing…anything new seems to take time away from whatever else you were doing to market your business and build your brand. Just like blogging though, social media is a part of the web that is here to stay. The players may change (MySpace to Facebook, etc.), but the game remains the same. Social influence matters. So you have to decide first to do social media, make the time for it in your marketing plan, and make sure to leverage the hell out of it! There is no reason that you should be sitting online or on your phone all day engaging in social media when there are so many automation tools out there to help spread your content effortlessly. Can it all be automated? No. The key is to finding a balance on what should be automated and what shouldn’t.

Myth #2 – I’m Too Far Behind My Competitors

Ugh! I bought into this myth pretty early on with Twitter. By the time I decided to take Twitter seriously, several of my major competitors were way ahead of me in terms of followers and engagement. It’s also a problem if you are in a niche with major brands as your competitors, but guess what? You have to start somewhere. One step at a time. If you have a list, make sure to continuously encourage them to reach out to you on social media. If you are a solopreneur, more than likely, your list members and followers would love to reach out to you personally. So eliminate that via contact forms, etc. and ask them to engage you via your Facebook Page. There’s also a lot of tools out there that you can use to give people access to content if they pay with a “tweet”. You could try Pay With A Tweet for that. It’s free.

Myth #3 – Social Media Doesn’t Result In Sales Or Help My Business

I’m really baffled by this one, but many of the women believed this which I found utterly amazing. As far as brand awareness, social media works much like advertising but better because there is real social engagement about the product in real-time. An ad runs on television in hopes that it will keep the product or service in the minds of people going to make a purchase. Same holds true for social media. The constant engagement keeps the product or services’s brand in the minds of people who may make a future investment in it AND there is the added benefit of social proof. If 10 people online say that they love the taste of the new Pepsi Next on Facebook, then that has more value to me than simply just a commercial for the product.

And how about customer service? There are big brands like Virgin America who use Twitter and Facebook as their main customer service hubs. *Experts estimate that this saves Virgin about 13 million dollars in customer service expenses.

Myth #4 – There’s Too Much Chatter & Not Enough Substance On Social Media

Okay, it’s true. There are people who are out there talking about their fingernail polish and what they ate for breakfast! Plus all the social media experts are out there telling us that we have to build relationships on social media. Connect with people. Have conversations. Be real. Be transparent. But let’s be honest here, we are all in business, but we are all human beings as well. Here is another area in social media where you have to find a balance. People must feel that they know, like and trust you to make an investment in you. So if one of your members is having a 25th wedding anniversary and posts it in social media, then like it. Comment on it. People will notice that you are paying attention. People will connect with you on a personal level. As you do this, you also must balance this with posts and comments on what you’re doing in your business. A blog post you published. A video you just posted to YouTube. An aha moment. A good news announcement.

After Google, Facebook is my number #2 referral of traffic to my website. That’s nothing to sneeze at! So people are able to cut through the mindless chatter and connect with relevant messages. My traffic is proof of that and I bet you’ll see it too when you start using social media regularly.

Myth #5 – My Clients Don’t Use Social Media

I was in a room with many women who have corporate backgrounds and haven’t quite yet embraced the idea that this “new” marketing strategy is effective or even used by their customers but here’s a little enlightenment if you believe in the same: *the average internet user spends about 5 hours online each week on social networks, LinkedIn is the world’s largest business network and is used by over 161 million users, 11 new Twitter accounts are created every second, and 1 out of 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook. If none of these people are your customers or clients then I’d be very surprised.

I’m sure I’ve missed something. What social media myths have you run into when working with clients? I’d love to hear about them.

*SearchEngineNews

How To Automatically Retweet Your Favorite Twitter Follower’s Tweets In 60 Seconds (or less!)

April 15, 2012 By Lisa Angelettie 6 Comments

“Attract New Strategic Alliances & Thank Your Existing Parnters When You Retweet Their Content To Your Community. Best thing is — it’s all on autopilot. Doesn’t look spammy. And you can accomplish it all in 60 seconds or less:)”

It’s really more important than ever to get social media “right”. One of the ways that you can use social media to your advantage, is to use it to build an inner circle of friends a.k.a. circle of influence who support you and your business and vice-versa.

This isn’t the average social media user we’re talking about. This is typically someone who you have identified as having a strong social media presence, someone who loves what you do and wants to genuinely support you on your journey, and someone who you feel the same about.

Once you’ve identified these people (and this is an going activity), there are going to be some folks who always have something good to share on Twitter and you’ll want to “retweet” that type of stuff because you like their content AND it will help strengthen your alliance with them. When they see that you are supporting them, they will more than likely do the same for you.

For those people ONLY, I like to set up the automatic retweet feature. Now don’t worry, you don’t have to retweet everything that they post, because that would be annoying and spammy looking. But with this quick trick I’m going to show you, you can be very specific about what you retweet from each person who choose to do this for. I’ve chosen to shoot a short video tutorial to show you how I set this up.

Resources:
1. Obviously you will need your own Twitter account
2. You need the Twitter handles of the people you want to retweet
3. The tool that I use to set all this up is TweetAdder.

While I do love free resources like Hootsuite, Tweetadder is a paid but very affordable social media tool that works on both PCs and Macs which I absolutely love. I’ve been using them for at least a year, I’m pretty sure longer though. I haven’t found a free tool that will allow me to do what I’m showing you today, and Tweetadder keeps the software updated regularly and there have been no issues between them and Twitter (like API stuff).

Watch the quick 5 minute tutorial below and set up your retweets in seconds!

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