By Rick Ramos
If you are a retailer using social media to market your business and have never heard of Klout, you might want to check it out. Klout.com is a free resource that uses social media analytics to measure your rank according to your social influence. In March 2013, the firm announced “Klout for Business,” analytics to help businesses and brand users learn about their online audiences.
Your Klout score
Klout calculates your score, which is a number from 1 to 100, by tracking more than 400 signals from eight social networks. Updated daily and published for everyone to view, your score is a combination of attributes, the most important of which is the ratio of interactions you get compared to the amount of content you share. Ten retweets from a single tweet is more important than ten retweets from ten tweets. Klout also considers who is retweeting your content. If President Obama retweets your tweet, you can be sure your Klout score will skyrocket, compared to the kid down the block with ten followers retweeting your tweet.
Offline retailers and Klout
Review what types of posts are getting the most engagement and try to duplicate them. Use the information to figure out what your audience is truly interested in and cater to those needs.
Like any metric in business, you should periodically monitor and review your Klout score. If you are actively using social media, strive to have your score continually increase or at least remain at the same level. Review what types of posts are getting the most engagement and try to duplicate them. Use the information to figure out what your audience is truly interested in and cater to those needs. For example, if you are a women’s clothing retailer and you find that your audience responds best to shoe photos, show more shoes. If you are outsourcing your social media to a third party, review your results quarterly with them. Figure out new strategies and tactics to grow your followers and user engagement. Here are some proven tips to increase your Klout Score:
Share content worth sharing. Sometimes people think they need to constantly share to improve their social media standing when just the opposite is true. Companies that share only three to four times a week actually have higher engagement. Before you hit the share button, ask yourself, would I share this to my friends?
Start discussions. Social media is at its best when you are communicating. Try and start a discussion with your followers and become an active participant.
Choose your social networks. You do not need to be active on every social network but make sure you focus on the big ones. Facebook and Twitter are a must. Pinterest is also one of the strongest social networks for retailers. Although Klout does not measure activity from Pinterest, it recommends that you are active on that platform as Pinterest can be a big traffic driver and has a large following of women. Instagram is also a growing photo social network that is worth looking at when it comes to appealing to a younger demographic.
Engage your influencers. Social media is all about influencing the right people. Identify your followers with the highest influence and engage with them often. These people will also have high Klout scores.
Klout is not something you need to monitor on a daily basis but it is a good gauge to monitor your process. Once you start checking your Klout score, it will be easier to do the right things to improve your social influence.
Rick Ramos is a seasoned online marketing veteran with over 17 years of experience developing global brands for major industry players. He is the author of the book, “Content Marketing: Insider’s Secret to Online Sales & Lead Generation,“ an Amazon #1 best seller in Marketing in 2013. Ramos has 26,000 followers on Twitter, 3,000 on Google and 4,000 on Linkedin. He provides a service to companies to grow their social media following.