Christian Fictoor weblog

Your KLOUT score is important.
In this blog I will tell a little about KLOUT, the tool (which is considered to be te worldwide standard) to measure your online influence.
I’ve also embedded a Youtube video (by IncreaseOnlineProfits.com) with a short walk-through of KLOUT and on how to give a K+ to people you think are influential about certain topics. Klout now measures the online influence of more then 100 million people wordlwide and is also used by major brands like Audi, HP, Disney and Nike.

To start what is KLOUT and what does it measure exactly :
KLOUT measures your influence via different social media channels. Currently it measures your activity on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare (more channels will follow this year ; maybe also Google+?).

So that is all nice but what do you gain by this ?
Basically KLOUT tells you if you are doing a good job on social media:

• Do people click on the links / messages you post.
• Do people retweet and/or talk about you (for example @-mentions in Twitter).
• Do people ‘LIKE’ your posts?
• How many user follow you, how many do you follow back?
• Who do you influence the most?

This and many other variables (more on that later in this weblog post) are combined in a score from 1-100 points. The score is updated daily and is presented in a number of clear graphs :

You will also see the following graphs:

True Reach
True Reach is the size of your engaged audience. We eliminate inactive and spam accounts, and only include accounts that you influence. To do this we calculate influence for each individual relationship taking into account factors such as whether an individual has shared or acted upon your content and the likelihood that they saw it.

True Reach is broken into the following subcategories:

Reach
Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
How far has your content been spread across Twitter?
Are people adding you to lists and are those lists being followed?

Demand
How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?
How often are your follows reciprocated?
Factors measured: Followers, Mutual Follows, Friends, Total Retweets, Unique Commenters, Unique Likers, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, @ Mention Count, List Count, List Followers Count.

Amplification Probability
Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your content will be acted upon. How often do your messages generate retweets or spark a conversation? The ability to create content that compels others to respond and high-velocity content that spreads into networks beyond your own is a key component of influence.

Amplification Ability is a composite of the following subcategories:

Engagement
How diverse is the group that @ messages you?
Are you broadcasting or participating in conversations?

Velocity
How likely are you to be retweeted?
Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?

Activity
Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience?
Are your tweets effective in generating new followers, retweets and @ replies?

Factors measured: Unique Retweeters, Unique Messages Retweeted, Likes Per Post, Comments Per Post Follower Retweet %, Unique @ Senders, Follower Mention %, Inbound Messages Per Outbound Message, Update Count.

Network Influence

Network Influence is the influence level of your engaged audience. Engagement is measured based on actions such as retweets, @messages, follows, lists, comments, and likes. Each time a person performs one of these actions it is a testament to the authority and the quality of your content. Capturing the attention of influencers is no easy task, and those who are able to do so are typically creating spectacular content. Network Score looks at the Klout score of each person who interacts with you to determine:

How influential are the people who @ message you?
How influential are the people who retweet you?
How influential are the people who follow you?
How influential are the people who list you?
How influential are the people who follow the lists you are on?

Factors measured: List inclusions, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, Unique Senders, Unique Retweeters, Unique Commenters, Unique Likers, Influence of Followers, Influence of Retweeters and Mentioners, Influence of Friends, Influence of Likers and Commenters

How to give K+ (extra influence score) to people you are think are influential about certain topics (VIDEO) :

Start with measuring your KLOUT score today:

1) Go to http://www.klout.com
2) Login using your twitter or facebook account
3) Go to ‘Edit profile’ (click on icon left of the search box) and complete this (basic info, connected networks).
4) Klout will now start to measure your influence daily.

Curious about other users KLOUT score ?
Simply type the twitter user name in the search box on the top right. Start comparing how you are doing compared to other users!

Like my post?
Retweet, like, +1 etcetera and/or:
K+ me: search for chrisfictoor in the searchbox on the top-right (see the video on how to do this).

Christian Fictoor

Need a Google+ / Googleplus invite? Please e-mail me your gmail-adres and I’ll send an invite!

Google has tried and failed to strengthen its position as a major player in the realm of social media. Google Wave and Google Buzz were (sometimes clumsily) launched and failed to raise applause from social media users.

Now Google has launched the bèta version of Google+ and it looks that they have finally ‘got it right’

Can Google+ ‘win’ the battle against Facebook and Twitter (and other social media channels)? In the last few years they (Twitter and Facebook) have already gained an enormous user-base and have established a solid market-share and Google+ has yet to prove itself to the social media community.
So at this time it’s to early to answer the question if Google+ will win the battle against the current ‘social media giants’ but the signs are certainly there.
Basically Google took all the best elements of currently existing platforms and combined them into their new social media en-devour Google+.
But they did more. Especially the way to group contacts is extremely smart. You can put your contacts in ‘ circles ‘ grouping them by, for example “family”, “business contacts” and “friends”.

But there’s (much) more why I think that Google+ is an interesting new platform:

• you can add photos, QR codes, links and much more interesting rich-media information to your ‘about’ page
• you get unlimited storage on Picasa (Google’s photo and video sharing platform – should Flickr be worried?)
• search results (SEO) could be hugely impacted in the future by using Google+
• Google+ is seamlessly integrated with their mobile platform Android (Iphone/Ipad apps in the future?)
• the free live video-chat feature (possible with multiple users) makes Google+ stand out from Facebook and is a very interesting option
• the stream of posts from you and your Google+ friends looks a bit like a combination between Facebook and Twitter (best of both worlds)
• option to show posts per circle
• if you have location enabled on your mobile device Google+ can create circles ‘nearby’ (interesting feature for location based marketing)
• ‘sparks’ option; a (currently) small selection of topics showing you posts about the interest-field you’ve selected
• potential for growth is enormous because Google can easily expand their system with for example social bookmarks, a ‘quora-like’ Q&A feature and of course their own services like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Music etc.
• the search engine let’s you find people easily and adding new friends to your circles is as easy as counting from 1 to 3

through implementation of Google’s “Google Wallet” payment system it could well become an interesting e-merce and/or crowd-funding platform

So there we have it. A long list of interesting Google+ features that should trigger other social media platform to better follow their new competitor very closely.

BUT Google+ is still in bèta… Only people invited by current Google+ users can join (if you need an invite please contact me). And even then you might be in for a wait because Google opens and closes the ‘doors’ to their new platform as they please.
Of course the staggering numbers of users that platforms like Facebook and Twitter have will not be reached by Google+ as long as the platform is still in bèta but in my opinion they just might have just finally struck ‘social media gold’ with this new platform.

As a social media marketeer I’ll keep experimenting with this new platform to try out the unique features of Google+ and see how they could be suitable for our clients. I think it is an interesting addition to the already (very) wide range of social media channels.
Keep in mind that social media channels come and go (sometimes very fast) but I think Google+ is here to stay.

If you are already on Google+ please connect with me (http://plus.google.com/104089034994416821424) or search for ” Christian Fictoor ” via the Google+ search option.
Hope to welcome you in one of my circles !

UPDATES BELOW :

UPDATES july 18th : Google+ reaches approx 20 million users. 33% of the Google+ users is female. You can now invite people to Google Plus more easily via the “Invite people to join Google+” link (bottom right of the home (after you logged in).

How to transfer your Facebook friends to Google+ all at once :

UPDATE july 11th: Google+ big succes, claims “Millions” of users already (audio interview with Eric Schmidt (Google), please turn up volume, audio quality is not that high …) :

Full article at : http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/09/eric-schmidt-on-gauging-googles-success

UPDATE july 11th : Infographic (thanks to : http://www.technobombs.com)

UPDATE july 8th : Google+ announced that it will launch company pages (somewhat like Facebook fanpages) in about two weeks, in the meantime G+ asks companies not to join Google+ under their company name.

UPDATE july 6th : I’ve added a video tour by Lifehacker.com below :

UPDATE juli 5th: Ford Europ runs first brand competition on Google+ (read the full article by @gordonmacmillan here).

Christian Fictoor
Fictoor Wagelaar crossmedia marketing communication
Christian Fictoor weblog
Twitter: @chrisfictoor | @fictoorwagelaar

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