Klout your way to Conquering Social Media Step 8

Klout is the way to ENSURE you Conquer Social Media 2012

Hi, this is Wayne Mansfield. Welcome back to my 23 Steps of  to Conquer Social Media 2012.

This step is step 8, we're going to talk about the authority applications that have come to the web since everybody's stopped using their computer and accessing the Internet by smart phones, iPads, slates, and soon the new Microsoft application, SURFACE. And the granddaddy of all applications, the one that seems to have the most traction at the moment is called Klout, spelled K-L-O-U-T.

The idea is for you to have a high Klout score, which means that when people are searching for your information, your product, your company, on the net, the person with the highest Klout score is served up first by the search engines. Now, it's relatively new and most people don't understand how it works, and one of the things that Klout have been very careful about is they've disguised how their algorithm works and therefore they're hoping that people can't game it and get a higher score than is necessary. But, for example, most people will have a score of 20 or less.

If you have a Klout score of 40, it means that you are active in social media; 50 means people are taking notice of you. My current score is 64, which puts me in the top thousand of people on Klout. A great friend of mine, Michael Q Todd, he has a score that fluctuates between high 70s and 80s. And he is generally recognized as one of the leading people when it comes to social media.

Now, you can have a high score and a very low audience. For example, you might be the expert in dogs, and that might only have a small audience. Or you might be the expert in Justin Bieber. He has a high 90 rating in talking about himself, which would seem to be quite logical when you think about it. Now, what you need to do is understand how Klout works. It scores your social media activity across a number of applications. The main ones you would expect are things like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.

Then, it gets to some interesting areas, Instagram, FourSquare, and it looks at the areas where most people are being active on social media. If you want your Klout score to grow, you need to go Klout, which is K-L-O-U-T.com, and register.

Normally, you would register with your Twitter identity or your Facebook identity, and then it will track how active you are on the net and in 90 day cycles, which are 90 days continuous, so each day is what you were doing in the previous 90, it records your score. And by having, as I said, a high Klout score in your area of influence, before very long you will start to be noticed more than most people.

That's Step 8 of our 23 Steps to Conquer Social Media 2012. I look forward to you joining me again when we look at other techniques we can use. This is Wayne Mansfield saying bye for now.