Startups measuring social media performance — like Klout, Kred and TweetGrader — are popping up everywhere as companies look to gain an understanding of the trend and their place in it.
But, once a company has implemented a social media strategy, how does it measure effectiveness?
Perhaps the most talked about — and most controversial — monitoring tool on the market is Klout, a San Francisco company founded in 2008 that provides social media analytics to measure a user’s influence across social networks, primarily Twitter, Google+ and Facebook currently. Scores are given on a 1 to 100 scale — the higher your score, the better.
Klout CEO Joe Fernandez, who has a score of 69, says social media tools such as Klout have created a “democratization of influence.”
“Every individual can get to become someone famous,” Fernandez said. “Each of us now has to market ourselves.
Fernandez said Klout’s ultimate goal is to have hundreds of networks influence the score.
Klout has become a useful tool enabling social users to determine how influential users are across various social network by measuring company and individual influence online using social network data, anywhere you have an online presence.
The more content creation or sharing that results in actions — likes, retweets, comments — the more influential you become. Klout then uses this information to generate a Klout score that measures overall influence.
In Connecticut, ESPN ranks highly on Klout with a score of 85. In comparison, Gov. Dannel Malloy scores a 55, Northeast Utilities a 40 and UConn Health Center a 28.
Although everyone wants to know their score, not everyone is buying into Klout and its million-plus users just yet, arguing that the company over-simplifies social media measurement and that the very measurement itself is difficult to fully understand.
Alexander Halavais, associate professor of communications at Quinnipiac University and a strong believer in analytics as a tool to provide constant feedback, was originally drawn to Klout, but has since changed his mind.
“Klout is silly. It’s not reliable or transparent,” he said. “It’s a neat idea, but it feels like it wasn’t very well baked before they brought it to public attention. There’s no reason to believe influence is as variable as a Klout score suggests. And all networks are not made equal: influence is not easily reduced to a uni-dimensional score.”
“It’s important that businesses establish a set of social media metrics, and Klout is attractive because it is freely available and visible. But I would advise businesses to go with metrics that more closely match their objectives and provide clear evidence for their scores.”
Klout allows users to benchmark how well they are doing in terms of attracting followers and also shows them ways to increase their following via the various social networks.
“We shouldn’t be obsessed with any single measurement tool — especially not from a startup with a limited track record,” says Rich Tehrani, CEO at TMC, a global media company based in Norwalk. “But we do need to measure how many people follow us, engage with us and retweet us so we can see what sort of impact we are having.”
Tehrani, with a current Klout score of 43, believes all business is becoming social business and that Klout’s goal is to establish itself as the generic rank for social businesses
“You should track your score but I wouldn’t be concerned with it right now,” Tehrani said. “What is more important than the score is getting it to increase over time to take advantage of the new opportunities social business will allow.”
