How Klout can Guide Your Marketing Strategy

UPDATE – Klout is now defunct – The following marketing softwares can fill your Klout void.

1. Social Mention

2. Empire.Kred

3. Twitter Counter

4. Hootsuite Insights

5. BuzzSumo

To many long-time marketers, Klout might seem like a useless tool used to brag about social influence. If you’re unclear about what Klout actually does, here’s a quick run-down. Klout uses social media accounts, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, to grade online participants. When you create an account and add all your social media sites, Klout will give you a Klout Score from 1-100. The more influential you are, the higher your Klout Score. Clearly, your Klout Score will very rarely be something your customers are checking up on, but it can help you amp up your social media marketing and content strategy. Here are a few reasons why you should consider focusing on your Klout Score.

It will help you keep your online profiles updated

Since Klout takes the consistency of your profiles into account, you will need to keep your online profiles accurate. It’s always a good idea to check out your social media sites and see what you can update. You don’t want your social media profiles to have inaccurate information because that will make your company look unprofessional.  Klout can help you focus on the image of your company and your overall social media marketing strategy. You wouldn’t hand out an outdated business card or send customers to an outdated website, would you? Make sure you put the same attention into your social media sites.

It will make you think about the content you share

If you haven’t been creating or sharing much content, your Klout Score will show it. Recently, Klout has begun offering a content marketing tool that suggests content for users to share to their followers. Sam Fiorella from The Huffington Post explains, “instead of creating original content that your audience wants to share, Klout will present content from others that can be shared. The hope, presumably is to increase the likelihood that users’ content will be responded to or be retweeted.” Once you start thinking about what you share and what impact it will have on your Klout Score, this could help you focus more on putting out great content. Even if you’re not too worried about your Klout Score, you can still take the time to put out the content that best fits your company.

It will force you to pay attention to others

Klout will most likely inspire you to check out what your competition is doing and focus more on what your customers want. Make sure you check out what people in your industry are talking about and what concerns them the most. Engage your customers and do your best to have a conversation with them. Figure out how you can best reach them. Keeping an eye on Klout will hopefully get you to think more about your customers and what they want from your company. It’s important to remember that social media marketing isn’t just about sharing content—you need to show your followers that you’re listening to them and that you care about them. If you want to improve your social media strategy, you need to focus on engagement, which Klout can help you out with.

Give Klout a try if you’re looking for ways to improve your marketing strategies. You might think about your content in ways you haven’t tried before and you might see your social media interaction improve. Have you tried Klout? What do you think? Share with us!