We are using KLOUT – The Influence Metric

Screenshot: Wo-Built's Klout Dashboard
Social Media Analytics
Credit: Klout - The Standard for Influence

We are probably one of the few small to medium sized construction companies that use social media extensively. Hence it is important for us to see how effective our social media efforts are. In the past the only indication of effectiveness was our hit rate to the website by links from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Like anything, social media is an investment in time and a return on investment needs to be achieved to justify the activities. Do not kid yourself, anyone who claims you can do social media effectively and meaningfully in 15 minutes a day, is thoroughly mistaken in our view. Effective social media means you should correspond with your friends and followers, answer their tweets, acknowledge their input and comments. In return, comments from you to them are also important. No amount of automation will achieve the personal touch, however there has to be structure. As a sample, we set-up the Wo-Built Daily on Paper.li not to miss interesting articles and comments by our followers and friends. But even this will take more than 15 minutes.

So, when we heard about KLOUT we jumped on the chance to see our effectiveness and our measure of our overall online influence. To our delight we found that we are classified as 'Socializer's, a hub of the social scene and people count on us to find out what is happening. We are also influential at present in the following topics: toronto, construction, business and neighbours, all topics close to our heart and our expertise.

Influence is defined as per KLOUT’s own website: “We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action -- "action" might be defined as a reply, a retweet, a comment, or a click. We perform significant testing to ensure that the average click-through rate on links shared is highly correlated with a person's Klout Score. The 25+ variables used to generate scores for each of these categories are normalized across the whole data set and run through our analytics engine. After the first pass of analytics, we apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final Klout Score. 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.” Scores are out of 100.

Our Overall KLOUT SCORE is 37, which means "You are effectively using social media to influence your network across a variety of topics".

Our True Reach is 92, which means "You have a small but tightly formed network that is highly engaged".

We are delighted by the scores, as they show that we are not wasting our time; however they also show some of the potentials. We need more responses from our friends and followers and we will be actively working on those. We will further relationships with women in the trades and construction, green professionals and of course our neighbours in Corso Italia and our clients.

The score on KLOUT gives us another tool to analyze how we reach our public. Leads for projects will come increasingly through social networking. That’s why it is important to know how effectively our message connects with our network and subsequently prompts potential clients into action to buy our services. In the end all that counts is money in the till.

Martina Ernst
Wo-Built Inc. - Innovative Design and Build