Nonprofit Fundraising Technology Tips – Try Klout to measure your social media influence

Using social media to help build the donor base and enhance communications is something I strongly recommend for every nonprofit looking to improve their professional fundraising services. While there are vast array of social media options the market currently dominated by Twitter and Facebook although like everything else on the Internet will change so keep on top of new developments. For a long time now I’ve advocated that those two tools in addition to blogging are the three most efficient ways to connect with your audience, news this week that LinkedIn will now be included in the products being supported by Klout allows me to officially certify LinkedIn stepping up from being the top contender in social media to now joining the inner circle along with Twitter and Facebook.

LinkedIn has continued its steady growth fairly organically and provides a very business centric social networking experience, one that allows the user to really express a great deal about their organisation and themselves while being able to link with like-minded people or companies. A very active community of groups helps to supplement the benefits of LinkedIn and perhaps most importantly of all it’s become an environment where strong connections are made and business gets done.

Klout is in the business of measuring influence online and has grown more rapidly than many competitors tools that offer similar services. Until now Klout generated these influence scores based on Twitter and Facebook, the addition of LinkedIn will greatly improve the service and capture in my opinion more pertinent information. As for Klout it’s a fascinating tool that analyses how you network, who you network with and topics that you network about. Your overall user behaviour is evaluated by using a series of algorithms and analysis that then generates an overall score or ranking. While the concept of ranking or assigning a score to your social media activity is somewhat whimsical it does stir up some really useful information. It shows how you influence other people by them following things that you post about, how often they react to your information, how frequently your Facebook posts are liked or shared and so on. In all more than 30 variables are measured to create your overall Klout Score.

At present the tool seems to be most harmonious with Twitter and recent improvements have shown more capability of measuring Facebook as well. I expect that the addition of LinkedIn will only go to improve what is already a really useful tool. I find it interesting to see what topics Klout considers me to be influential within, I also find value in who influences me the most and vice versa. Adding the 100 million active LinkedIn users to the project convinces me that Klout is going to grow in popularity and in overall usefulness. The website will, after setting up an account, also allow you to view the Klout scores of everyone else.

I highly recommend it whether you are new to social media or experienced, it’s a great tool that will take a lot of guesswork away from analysing how well you are connecting. Of all the features I find the most valuable one to be your daily updated score which includes a separate components of amplification probability, true reach and network influence. The explanations behind each of those and your overall score is provided in depth on the Klout website. Using these tracking devices allows you to monitor your social media progress on a daily or weekly basis, I find it really fun more importantly very informative.

Register for a Klout account here (it’s completely free) and let me know what you think of the tool. Don’t forget to synchronise each of the accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) that you use when you create your personal profile.

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