A digital portfolio is an asset not limited to those directly involved with social media in their career. All professionals benefit from leaving a digital footprint and expanding their reach. It is valuable to periodically review your social media presence and see in what areas you are making an impact. There are several tools to help with this. These tools measure things like influence, ranking, engagement, and traffic. One thing to keep in mind with all of these tools is that it is a good measure of influence over time. Quick snapshots do not dig deeper into trends and long-lasting impact.
Klout
The first tool is Klout.com. This is a comprehensive service that allows you to track social media impact across several platforms. There is no cost to creating an account with this system.
Klout provides quantifiable numbers from the macro to micro level. At a macro level, it provides an overall score as can be seen in the figure below. This score has a maximum of 100 percent, however, it is very hard for an individual to score above 70. In fact, a score between 40 and 70 for an individual is considered to be quite high.
At the micro level, Klout will show you your individual topics in which you have influence. These are ranked in percentages in comparison to others who publish about these topics. The purple tag with expert indicates a ranking in the top 1 percentile.
The final feature of Klout.com, which is very helpful, is the measures progress according to several criteria. The below graph tracks the overall score over time. The pie chart on the right-hand side shows audience engagement by social media platform. There are two different ways to analyze this chart. The first is to identify those areas in which you are connecting and focus your time on those. The second is to diversify your efforts and improve impact on other social media platforms that you consider strategic.
Kred
A site with very similar features to Klout is Kred.com. This platform also provides a scoring metric. In addition, it has features inherent to the system including Kredentials and Kred Moments. Those features allow you to see the communities in which you are interacting.
Agilience
The final tool to review is Agilience. This tool was saved for last because it is the least helpful tool for tracking individual impact unless you are in the top 100 most influential social media networks in a specific area. However, a very useful feature of Agilience is the ability to connect with others who are extremely influential in a field. You can use traditional searching features to discover these accounts.
Connecting with others brings up articles that might be of interest to you. You can choose to re-share these articles or sources of information. The related authorities section shows other accounts with a particular topic.
After using these tools, you should have a more comprehensive picture of your social media presence. It is important to remember that none of these tools are perfect. They all use specific data to provide measures. It is important to use these as trends over time and not as an instant snapshot of your impact. Think about musicians. One-hit wonders make a big splash, but they do not sustain impact over time. A consistent and increasingly influential social media presence increases engagement and builds connections.
