Do Your Tweets Have Enough Klout?

In today's guest post, author and book marketing expert Steven Lewis explains how to use Klout to enhance the effectiveness of Twitter as a promotional tool.

Do Your Tweets Have Enough Klout?

by Steven Lewis

Twitter could be a significant source of traffic to your website but how do you know if you're using it right?

I joined Twitter when it launched in 2006 and I lasted about a week. It just wasn't obvious what it was for — I didn't know anyone who used Twitter and I didn't know how to find people interested in the same things I was. What's the point in a telephone if you don't know anyone else who has one? It wasn't until the third time I joined (January 2008 to be precise) that I "got" Twitter and I'm glad I did: Twitter is now the second biggest source of traffic to my blog after Google. It's important to me, therefore, to be tweeting as effectively as possible. That's where Klout comes in.

Klout is a free web service that uses several metrics to measure your "influence" in Twitter. I might have 6,000 followers on Twitter but that doesn't matter if those followers never mention me or retweet (forward) what I say. Klout measures your influence by looking at your:

"True reach": how many of your followers are actually engaging with your tweets.

"Amplification": how likely your followers are to respond to you

"Network influence": how influential your network is — being retweeted by someone with 20 followers is less impactful than being retweeted by someone with 10,000 followers who pay close attention to them

You get individual scores for all these metrics and an overall score out of 100.

Klout also lists the topics on which you're influential. According to the service I'm influential in Writing, Journalism, Authors and the Kindle. This is perfect because these are exactly the sorts of things I want to be known for talking about authoritatively. Yes I tweet about my holidays, meals out and family like everyone else but I'd want to recalibrate the balance if those messages were dominating my tweets to the extent people people might think I was all about burgers and water parks.

There is debate over how Klout makes its calculations and I have my own quibbles but this isn't the Olympics, medals aren't being decided by differences between scores. What I use the service for is to look at the trends.

A couple of months ago my overall score was in the low 40s. The maximum score is 100 but 40 isn't as bad as you would think. Nonetheless I wanted to get my score up so I concentrated on:

What I tweet — I'm not just looking for followers, I'm looking for followers who write and self-publish so I concentrated on tweets and links that would be interesting to them

How often I tweet — you might tweet gold but you're not casting a very wide net if you only do it a couple of times a week

When I tweet — I'm in Australia so there's every chance I'm awake when you're asleep. Services like TweetDeck, HootSuite, SocialOomph and Buffer let me schedule tweets so I'm giving value to my followers all over the world.

Within a month my Klout score was 50, a 25 per cent improvement. The score is recalculated daily so you'll quickly know if you're slipping again and being less useful to your followers.

Don't get too hung up on how you're stacking up next to other people. I have about 6,000 followers and have tweeted almost 10,000 times. My sister has fewer than 100 followers and hardly ever tweets but her Klout score is only slightly lower than mine. The point is not how well I'm doing against my sister, the point is how well I'm doing against myself: as long as my score is going up, I know I'm not the right track.

About the Author

Steven Lewis writes the Taleist self-publishing blog, where you can sign-up for his social media check-up, a free email course showing you easy ways to make sure you're using social media to maximum effect in promoting your books.