Klout.com – How Does Your Influence Rate?

Klout is quickly becoming a cornerstone of the social media marketing landscape. If you’re wondering what it is and what it can do for you, keep reading:

An Introduction

Klout is a simple idea, really: It measures your influence in social media the same as Google Analytics measures your website’s degree of success. One of the main ways Klout measures your success in social media is surprisingly simple: It asks everyone what they think of you.

Allowing users to rank one another for influence helps to cut right to the quick of it, foregoing messy statistics and so on and getting right to the question of whether or not people respect your opinion on movies, sports, music and so on.

Why This Matters

The future of marketing is in social media, either pushing your product or service on Facebook, or simply letting your users spread the good word for you. The currency in this new economy is influence. Klout ranks influence on a scale of 1 to 100, and somebody with a 100 ranking can make a real opportunity of it by using that influence to push a socially important topic or promote an overlooked book or movie.

Using Klout

Just like Google Analytics, Klout is not an answer in and of itself. It offers solutions of a sort, but the purpose of the site is to provide you with information, and it’s up to you to put that information to its best use. There are a lot of ways to make use of this information, of course, and it all depends on your marketing strategy.

Finding Influential Users

If you find somebody with an influence rating in the 80’s or higher, it would do you well to make a friend of them. Offering free trial runs of your new service, for instance, or even sending them free stuff in the mail or asking them to review your book for you can be very rewarding.

Many older marketers and business owners are against the idea of just giving things away to people who don’t work at an influential magazine or own a business of their own, but what these people don’t realize is that influence, not money, makes you rich and powerful in the 21st Century.

If you send somebody a copy of your new movie on Blu-Ray, you may be out the $30 you could have earned from selling it, but if they like it and review it positively on their Facebook feed, then you’ve earned a lot more than that money ever would have bought you.

Think of social media as the new publishing scene. You don’t need a positive review from a magazine anymore as long as the people on Facebook like what you’re doing.

Visit My Klout Profile Here: Anthony Trimble