Digital Marketing Blog <a href="http://www.evonomie.net/"></a>: Score yourself! What's your social rating?

The ever increasing popularity of social media as a personal and professional tool has led to the inevitable creation of ratings tools, allowing you to link up and monitor your social media channels and how well people engage with you on them. Not only is a score given that shows how skilled you are at social media interaction, but you can also establish yourself as an expert in specific knowledge fields and give others certain indications that will show you see them as an expert in that field.

The scores are all cleverly worked out by aggregating over 400 different signals in each individual’s social media activity, and just as your use of social media has an impact on the score you receive, the scores can also have a greater than expected impact on your professional life. Salesforce recently advertised for a new community manager, and listed “Klout score 35 or higher” as a desired skill for the position. They are not the only company to put a great deal of weight on a candidate’s Klout score, with one company reportedly cutting short an interview with a person who had 15 years experience working with established companies simply because his Klout score was 34. They then went on to hire someone with a score of 67.

Although not every employer is likely to place so much weight on, or even care at all, about Klout scores or other social media ratings, they are still something everyone, individuals and companies alike, should be using to gauge their presence on social media. The score can be an indicator of how well marketing efforts on social media are working, or how proficient you are in social media use in a job market where more jobs roles every day are demanding digital and social media skills as a preference or even requirement.

The Tools For Measuring Your Social Rating

The main popular scoring tools for social media influence at the moment are Klout, PeerIndex and Kred. Whilst they each appear to have the same initial function, to produce a score based on your social media influence, they also have their own individual functions, some more useful than others.

Tool/Key Features	Influence-based Score	Industry Experts or ‘Influencers’	‘+’ points system for users to hand out	Influence taken from ‘traditional’ channels (ie. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn)	Influence also taken from ‘up and coming’ channels (e.g. Google+, Quora, etc.)
Klout	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
PeerIndex	Y			Y	Y
Kred	Y	Y	Y	Y

The most well known and used of the three tools mentioned, with over 100 million users, Klout does offer the most key features. Klout also offers other unique features as do the other two tools, but the table above is designed to highlight the features that are important and useful for professionals using the site.

The way Klout produces your score is not based upon the quantity of your audience, but the amount of ‘true reach’ you have, meaning how many of your audience actually engage with what you are sharing, and the quality of those that engage, so if a top influencer with 100,000 was to share or comment on one of your posts, this would have a greater impact on your score than if Joe Bloggs with 100 followers was to share or comment on the same post.

Klout takes into account data from more social networks than any other social influence measurement tool, looking at traditional sites as well as more up and coming and niche sites such as Instagram, Blogger, Tumbler and even Last.Fm.

To become an industry expert, or ‘influencer’ as Klout call it, you must regularly post engaging content about the topic, as the more people are seen to engage with your content, the more of an authority on the subject you are seen to be. Other Klout users can indicate that they believe a post or yourself in general to be authoritive on a particular subject field by giving you or the post a +K.

There is no wonder as to why there are so many users of Klout, as it is one of the original and best tools for measuring social influence.

PeerIndex has always been in Klout’s shadow, which is why not as many people have heard of it or use it, with the last recorded number of tracked profiles being 45 million. The site bases its scoring system on topics, audience and authority. It looks at the size of your audience and how much they rely on your recommendations, opinions and general knowledge of the specific topic area you are an authority in. It also looks at how much you do that relates to the topics you hold authority in, such as how much content you post, conversations you have, etc. Unlike Klout, PeerIndex does only track Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the up and coming social site Quora, but as we mentioned before, it’s about quality, not quantity.

With some more key features added it could actually compete with Klout, but for the moment PeerIndex is something that I use alongside Klout, which compliments it by offering another perspective on my influence, but could never replace it.

My Score – 697/1,000

My Outreach Level – 6 of 12

Only launched in 2011, Kred is still new to the influence measuring scene. It brings some interesting and unique features to that table, with ‘outreach’ level, scored out of 12, in addition to the typical influence score giving more for us to chew over and work on increasing. The outreach score is not just based on the current audience engaging with your posts, it’s based on new users following you or engaging because they have seen one of your posts through another person’s engagement.

Another feature that make Kred strong competition for the dominant Klout is real time updates, whereas Klout updates once daily. Kred also offers the option of adding ‘real world achievements’ which can bump up your score, and these can include your company size, any awards your company has received, etc, although I am not sure how this should translate as social influence.

Kred does pose a threat towards Klout’s reign as leading social influence measurer, but I think it has a long way to come yet before it can replace it entirely. It does however make a very useful additional social influence measurement tool due to its unique features such as the outreach score.