You can watch your Twitter follower count increase, and you'll know when new people befriend you on Facebook, but how do you know whether these people are listening to what you say? Small businesses, including the self-employed, can look to Klout for an answer. The free website analyzes data from your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and (coming soon) Foursquare accounts (or any combination of them) and rates you from 1 to 100 on your "overall online influence." The site reportedly measures 35 variables from Facebook and Twitter to measure "True Reach, "Amplification Probability," and "Network Score"—more on those in a moment.

Klout also identifies your "style" on a matrix that describes how different people interact with one another in online social media. Styles range from observer and explorer, to pundit and celebrity. I turn up as a "networker" while the Twitter account for PCMag.com earns the title "thought leader."

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Your Klout scores can change on a daily basis. The site tracks these changes and charts them, letting you know when your strategies have and have not been effective. When your scores drop, though, Klout doesn't provide much advice about how to turn them around. A sentence or two summarizing the change will appear in your Klout dashboard ("Your Klout Score has been rising recently. Keep engaging with your network and sharing different types of content to continue raising your score!"), but it doesn't give real, hard, actionable advice.

What Does Klout Measure?
To use Klout, you have to give the site access to one or more of your social media accounts: Twitter and Facebook are the staples, and LinkedIn is supported, too. Support for Foursquare has been announced but is not yet available. Klout actually gives you four scores altogether: an overall Klout score, True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network scores.

Klout reportedly looks at 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure the scores. The overall Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments, and retweets, according to the site. True Reach considers the size of your "engaged audience," looking for instances of followers and friends who actively "listen and react to" your posts. True reach is a raw number and the only score not based on a 1-to-100 scale. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will be retweeted, receive an @ reply in Twitter, or receive a "like" or comment on Facebook. The Network score looks at your engaged audience (the same people from True Reach) and then considers how influential they are.

Klout never says exactly what it measures or how it weights and punches all these numbers. It specifically calls out Facebook and Twitter, but leaves out LinkedIn. It talks about clicks, comments, and retweets, but doesn't even hint at whether any of these is seen as more valuable than another. And is there a difference, score-wise, between a frequent commenter's replies (perhaps a very nosey and vocal close connection) versus having many different people reply to your posts? Klout never says.

About the most revealing information Klout provides is: "[The] 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."

How Helpful is Klout ?
The most useful feedback Klout can provide is to validate that your presence on social networking sites and track how it changes over time. Klout pegged me as a "networker" although I hardly see myself that way. I'm less inclined to comment on what other people say and more likely to spout drivel about highly unrelated and scattered topics, like bagels and robots (Klout claims I'm influential on both these topics—see the slideshow).

When you use Klout over time, you'll pay attention to the graph that's generator when you first log in. The plotline will show how your score has progressed in the past 30 days. But for me, as a humble networker, I already know whether I've slacked off from Twitter and Facebook in the past month. I know without even having to think much about it. I suppose if you tweet really avidly you might lose sight of your own prolificacy, but I never did. If you use Klout for a business social media account that many people manage, the dashboard can instantly tell you which days were the most and least fruitful.

If you see a dip in your score, Klout doesn't help you out sufficiently with tips to get you back on track. The advice that does appear is too generic to be actionable. Here's an example: "Your Klout Score is stable over the past month, but has been falling recently. Try engaging more with your network and sharing different types of content to see if you can raise it." There's no further information about what "different types of content" means or how to "engage" with people.

Klout Perks
A weird feature in Klout, called Klout Perks, entices users with special deals, exclusively offered to Klout users of a certain threshold, theoretically. I found Klout Perks to offer little more than a direct mail credit card offer, the kinds of "promotions" that are thinly veiled advertisements without any added value. A free Subway sandwich that recently showed up in my list of possible Perks, was, on closer inspection, only for people who were "influential" about Subway on Twitter. Many of the Perks have the same requirements. You have to more or less turn yourself into a PR rep for their product before they'll give you the discount or promotional offer.

Klout is for Business
For individuals, Klout largely tells you what you already know about yourself and your social networking habits. For business users, especially teams who are managing one account, it's a different story, giving a very general snapshot of activity and success rate day-by-day over a month. For tips and tricks to improve, though, users will have to turn to other sources for advice.

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