Do you ever wonder who is reading those tweets you are sending?  How about whether those tweets have any real impact on the folks who are following you?  After all, a person’s influence cannot be measured by the number of followers alone.  Nope, you need to get a more robust sense of who is actually listening to you or acting upon your messages.  That is where Klout comes in!

Klout assigns scores to Twitter users by actually measuring the spheres of influence.  The higher the score, the more influential the person.  Klout also categorizes users into one of four categories, based on their scores.  Casual Users, for instance, may be new or have a small social circle online.  Climbers are on their way up, of course. Connectors are conduits of information to other users.  Finally, Personas  are folks that have really managed to build a brand around themselves in the Twitterverse.  Pretty cool, right?  If it sounds like a tricky and dificult process, it is.  And that is why it is so great to have Klout out there doing it for you.

So how does the Klout Score work?  Well, they actually use an interesting formula that takes into account 25 different variables! Stated most simply, Klout looks at the number of folks with whom you actually interact (True Reach), the likelihood that your tweets will cause interaction (Amplification Ability), and how influential the people with whom you interact are (Network Score).    They then normalize, analyze, and weight this data to derive your Score.  Talk about intense!

According to its website, “The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people. ”  The iBraryGuy team tested it out and, though not thrilled with our score, we really learned a great deal about how we interact with others on Twitter.  If you are serious about building your social brand, as we are, then it might be time that you checked your Klout as well!