22 Feb Does Your Klout Score Matter? (And 6 Other Measures of Influence)
From a marketing perspective, Twitter is all about metrics, right? Number of followers, retweets and brand mentions are the goals of PR and marketing companies operating Twitter accounts – they have to have something to report back to the client, after all. And taking things a step further, measurement tools such as Klout, Twitalyzer and Twinfluence attempt to measure ‘influence’. But does all this stuff really matter?
Since I started investing more personal time and effort into Twitter a couple of months back, I’ve tracked my Klout score periodically, more out of curiosity than anything else. Other than a dip last week when admittedly, I wasn’t at my Twest (a term for effective tweeting © Paul Sutton 2010), my Klout score has been steadily on the rise. Which means that, according to Klout, I’m doing the right things – interacting with influential people, supplying good sources of information worth passing on, gaining more followers and obtaining a wider and stronger sphere of influence. In short, I’m gaining more authority in my field. Which can only be a good thing. But, although as a marketer I should care, I’m still not really sure I do!
At the end of the day, the reasons I use Twitter are because a) I find it an invaluable source of interesting, relevant and up-to-date information, and b) I get to converse with amazing people who I either respect, share a profession or mindset with, like personally or, preferably, all three. Of course I want more followers and this is important to me, but the reason for this is not some ego trip, it’s because that it means I get more out of Twitter because I get to meet more (hopefully) relevant, interesting and knowledgeable people. In a literal sense, numbers and ‘influence’ don’t drive my life on Twitter.
I am, however, a marketer. And I’m all too aware that no-one invests in anything unless they can see a return. And so, although I don’t personally believe that Klout adds anything other than a point of curiosity to Twitter, I find myself regularly assessing the various metrics tools than have been built to help measure Twitter activity. If you’re in the same boat, try these:
Klout – analyses and grades influence
Twitalyzer – analyses a user’s behaviour
Twitturly – tracks and ranks tweeted URLs
Twinfluence – looks at the Twitter capital of leading Tweeters
TweetVolume – a simple measure of the volume of words or phrases
TwitterGrader – measures and ranks influence
TweetLevel – measures influence
What do you make of Klout and the various other metrics tools? Why do you tweet, and does your influence matter to you?
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