“I’ll share my Klout if you Influence me Later…”

Posted in Social Media on October 19th, 2011 by Angelina

Since Klout, the online measuring tool for social influence, was launched in 2009, over 100 million people now have a Klout score. Everyone has an opinion about Klout, whether it’s good or bad, but it’s hard to ignore and not get sucked into it…

What is Klout anyway?

Klout is an online tool that measures the social influence of a person or brand across a number of social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and more recently, YouTube which was added in August and Google+, which was added last month.

Based on your ability to drive action, Klout scores you between 1 and 100 (with 100 being the most influential). It uses data from the range of social networks to measure your true reach (how many people you influence), amplification (how much you influence them e.g. when people respond to your messages and share it) and your network impact (the influence of your network). In short, it measures whether people trust and like you enough to respond to the things you talk about.

Should you care about your Klout score?

Klout has always been something I’ve looked at and have had fun with whilst comparing scores with different people in the office on a personal level, but nothing more. However, while managing our client’s social media accounts and recording who is following them, I’ve taken their Klout score into consideration. The bottom line of Klout is that it gives me a good indication of how our social media efforts are working out.

It also helps me discover who the big players in our client’s industry are, follow and engage with them and have them follow us back.

But it should be taken into consideration that it shouldn’t be used as the only tool to decide who to follow as we do come across people who seem to have a very high Klout score – but only post spam or advertising, so we know that Klout can be gamed (as with many other things on the internet) and Klout can’t measure every type of influence, so it’s not the be all and end all and, perhaps, should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Other benefits of Klout?

After Klout took to the spotlight more recently, I discovered ‘Klout Perks’ which are used primarily by US brands who offer exclusive products or experiences that you can earn based on your influence. Previous examples were gift cards from various online retailers, tickets to events and hotel discounts.

But when accessing these perks, I got excited to see that a perk was available to me – a free sample of hair gel from Axe. However, the tagline on the ad was ‘Finally… a strong hold that she’ll want to touch’… hang on a second… then I read the spiel “When it comes to a guy’s hair, male and female satisfaction are often at odds…” I am definitely a girl, and I thought that Klout would be able to find this info using Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn’s API.

Anyway, I ignored this and tried to claim it anyway, but a message popped up saying “This perk is for US residents only” which is a fail, considering that information is on my Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn and Klout has access to the API’s for these social networking sites.

A bit of an anti-climax and obvious room for improvement from Klout, but I am hoping that UK companies will jump on the Klout bandwagon soon.

At the moment I have a Klout score of 51 (just over half way there to getting the perfect score of 100 like @JustinBieber), and for an unknown reason Klout tells me I’m influential about hotels and the Maldives (might have tweeted that I’m going on holiday there in the past), so I have my fingers crossed that a company will give me a free holiday one day.

At the moment, Klout is fun and can be useful, but we don’t need to become slaves to this measurement tool yet. Only time will tell whether Klout will be 100% reliable, we will just have to wait and see!

Who Will Come Out On Top of the Social Media Battle?

Posted in Social Media on September 27th, 2011 by Angelina

Last week, Facebook introduced some new changes on their social networking site. A few days later, Google+ made their social media accounts available to the general public. Could this be the start of a real social media battle?

Even though Google have denied that they are in direct competition with Facebook, everyone who has both these social networking accounts can see how similar they are to each other and how there’s always going to be some rivalry (let’s not forget Facebook’s association with Bing instead of Google).

Last week, Mashable ran a poll and just fewer than 35% of the 5,346 people who voted said that they hated the new Facebook! People also vented their anger and confusion using Twitter which then saw #NewFacebook trending.

However, we all know, from past Facebook changes that users will moan about the updates for a little while but then just accept the new changes and forget all about the old Facebook, allowing the social networking site to retain its users and continue growing.

Facebook has now reached over 800 million users whilst Google+ is also growing at a very quick rate, and has over 43 million users. Although the number is not as impressive as Facebook’s numbers just yet, we have to remember that Google+ is only 3 months old and has only this week become available to all people, rather than invite only.

With Google+ now open to the public, we are wondering if Google’s real time search would make a comeback after Twitter and Google failed to agree on terms so that Google could keep Twitter’s real time tweets in their results.

However, it seems that they are still at loggerheads with each other rather than working together. Bing renewed their contract with Twitter earlier this month to have real time results in their search engine, but who actually chooses Bing over Google when it’s not their default browser setting?

I have to admit that I’m one of the people that complained about the new Facebook changes and contributed to the discussion on Twitter, but still found myself using Facebook. Facebook is still the social network that most of my friends are using which makes using it much more interesting than Google+, where nothing is really going on in my circles yet. However, if I find that more people I know start using Google+ more I may get weaned off Facebook. It’s just what happened to my Myspace account, once everyone I cared about joined Facebook, my Myspace got deleted.

At the end of the day, people are going to choose and use a social networking site where they can actually be social with other people, rather than choose a networking site purely based on how great the user interface is.

We’re not sure if people are ready to ditch Facebook for Google+ just yet. Do you have a preferred social media account?

Have we already forgotten about Google+?

Posted in Google, SEO, Social Media on September 16th, 2011 by Matthew Read

Like most people in SEO, I spend a fair amount of time reading industry blogs, to see what people are currently talking about in the world of online marketing and looking out for the next big thing in SEO, such as Google+.

A couple of months ago you couldn’t move for posts about Google+, with everyone talking about its rivalry with Facebook, its sudden influx of 20 million users and hundreds of debates about how it was going to completely change the game! But now when I look around SEOMoz, Econsultancy, Search Engine Land and the rest I see barely a few mentions of this ‘revolutionary’ new social network.

To be fair, I am no better than the rest, when Google+ first came out I was straight on it and published 2 or 3 posts about how it could topple Facebook, change the way we connect online and add a huge new element to SEO, but now I am paying about as much attention to it as I am to AOL.

The fact of the matter is, so far we have seen little to no impact on SEO by Google+, and although it has 20 million+ users I haven’t seen a fresh update from any of my circles in weeks! Meanwhile, Facebook continues to roll out new features, such as the subscribe button, and both Facebook and Twitter are still much better places to interact with friends, fans and customers.

So where do we go from here?

A couple of months ago everyone was discussing how Google was becoming much more social and how we need to adapt to that and move away from traditional SEO tactics. However, in the last month there has been very little impact from Google+ and Google have not renewed their deal with Twitter, effectively losing some of their social element, rather than increasing it.

So should we just forget about Google+ and social networks altogether? Well no, social is obviously still very important for online marketing, with Twitter and Facebook being excellent mediums for creating brand awareness, customer interaction and content distribution, but I do think it is fair to say that the initial hype over Google+ was a bit much and that, although a move into social is good, abandoning traditional SEO tactics in favour of a social only approach might be a bit too presumptuous.

What is Klout anyway?

Should you care about your Klout score?

Other benefits of Klout?

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