Getting more “Klout” for your Business

Professional Golf Instructors spend countless hours refining their tools and applying science to the golf swing of their clients. Today there are a number of tools out there that use scientific principles to increase strength, speed, or consistency. Social media has long since been a labor of trial and error, and don’t get me wrong, there still is a large measure of that, however, now with free services like Klout.com we can start applying scientific principles to our social media in an effort to improve our results.

Applying Science to Social Media. I began my personal journey with social networking nearly 10-years-ago in 2003 when MySpace was launched. It was an amazing new power to be able to share my voice at the click of a button with thousands of people across the world. At that time, there was no real science to it. It was simply like wielding some sort of marketing shotgun: Try to reach as many people as possible and hope that they might like what I was selling. In a short amount of time I had reached 25,000 MySpace friends, a few of whom even bought something from me. Ten years later, and because of tools like Klout.com, we now can put science and statistics behind what we’re doing in order to achieve better results with less effort.

What is Klout.com? Joe Fernandez, the co-founder of Klout.com, had the epiphany for Klout while he was recovering from major jaw surgery in early 2008. Unable to speak, the 30-something entrepreneur used social media as his voice during his recovery. “Twitter was still kind of a joke,” Fernandez said in a recent interview with Fox News. “This was in early 2008, it was before hashtags were even really being used.” We’ve probably all wondered this as we posted tweets into the twitterverse and status updates to the masses: “How much is anyone actually hearing and responding to the information I’m sending out there. Am I wasting my time?” From this question, while laying in a recovery bed in his New York apartment, the idea for Klout.com was born.

Today Klout.com helps over 100 million users to be able to determine if the social media work they are doing is becoming more or less effective. It is a great tool to be able to have in your social media bag to be able to pull out at times to help make decisions on content, campaigns, and focus based on passed results. So how does it work?

How Does Klout.com Work? It’s simple. Go to Klout.com and login using your Twitter or Facebook logins. Secondly follow the steps by connecting the sites you’re using for your social media including Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and others. The site will do the rest of the work for you. If you are posting content that is being received and acted upon by individuals in your network, your score will increase. As you continue to post content, you can evaluate on a daily basis (if you desire) the type of information you are posting. From Klout.com I have been able to specifically target things that my fan base love and appreciate and, more importantly, have able to give them MORE of it. For example, recently I posted a photo of an ultrasound of my child. My network, which has a large number of female fans, went nuts over it. It got well over 200 comments and likes on Facebook with new people getting involved. Of course, my Klout Score shot up during that day peaking into the high 60’s. I realized through posting different things and monitoring my Klout Score that my fans want “personal” information. Since them, I’ve been able to accommodate and involve them more by providing photos, stories, posts, and questions that involve them on a personal level, all of which have positively impacted my score. Klout.com is a great tool to help any professional determine exactly what their fans want.

Go to Klout.com and start playing with it today.

For more details on the Klout Score and the other metrics you’ll find on Klout, go to: http://klout.com/#/understand

To read more on the Fox News Interview with Klout.com co-Founder Joe Fernandez, go to: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/community/2011/11/03/klout-ceo-fernandez-responds-to-critics-gives-tips-and-talks-future/