Unlike the SATs, this score may not measure how good you will be in college, but it does measure how you excel online and people may be using it to evaluate you.

What score is this? It’s your Klout score.

Klout is a free service where you can link all of your social media accounts to one profile. Klout then generates a number or “score” for you based on how many interactions you have online, ie: how many posts, retweets, favorites, likes and tags you make, create or have.

The score can go up and down as the above determining factors change each week and each month. The goal obviously is to steadily increase your engagement, your followers, and your mentions/tags in order to become more “influential” online. That’s how Klout sees it anyway. The higher the score the more influential YOU are.

This is what you would see if you searched for my Klout: I have a score of 73.
Not bad, but obviously still some room for growth! When you first sign up don’t be alarmed or dismayed if your score is in the 20’s or 30’s. With just a little bit of engagement and effort you can start to move the needle in the right direction.

Some Klout features that are worth noting:

• Klout helps you curate valuable content to market to your niche. You are able to create, via the “create” tab, posts that are relevant to your audience that Klout suggests for you. You can pick amongst shareable articles or post your own.

• Klout helps you find others in your business niche that you might want to follow, friend, or engage. It does this in a few ways. You can use the search function and type in someone’s name who you have had your eye on in your business realm. This will pull up the screen shot I posted above and show you their score. Influencers are good to know and be a part of their world because by engaging with them you engage their large audience too.

• Klout suggests influencers to you based on the topic you pick (these topics are all related to your own business niche), shows you top three influencers, their Klout score, their twitter feed and allows you to follow them right from that screen. You can hover over their profile to get an idea of the size of their audience. With this same feature Klout also suggests trending articles and popular content to share about that same topic allowing you to find influencers in your field, share content and tap into their audience all in one fell swoop!

For example when I pick the “Social Media” topic this is what comes up:

From the above screen I can follow Kim, Jeff, or Mike and share an article that (according to Klout algorithms) my followers find interesting.

Remember, though we may say Klout measures your “influence” that number means nothing if you don’t engage, respond and reach out to people in your sphere.

In summary:

• Use Klout to find people to follow and engage their audience that is similar to what you want yours to be.

• Use Klout to gauge your success. Are your efforts working? Is your score increasing? Or do you need to rethink your tactics?

• Use Klout to get inspired on what to share and when, which we all know can be a bear when handling many platforms at once!

So what’s your Klout Score? Is it higher than mine? Let’s share and compare!

Join myself and others like yourself in my LinkedIn group who are getting a handle on the social media side of their business. Click here and be a part of the community!

I look forward to seeing you in the group.