Klout

Klout is a social media software suite which allows you to access to utilize audience targeting to determine who audience influences are so you can engage them with their perks and having them become brand advocates. There's certainly a great social return on investment to be had by big brands which utilize the power of Klout to identify and engage these power advocates of your niche, industry or brand in order to incentivize them and further share your brand whether it be via social media or word of mouth. But there is no contract in place that obliges advocates to do so it's the reciprocity that and the value offered in the Perk which creates this and that's a financial cost to consider. The reference I found from 2012, I believe it was, from one their management at the time saying they don't rely on an immediate pricing model because they had over one thousand customers with their API access including some really big companies stating that Perk sponsorship arrangements and marketing are how they level are how they are paying. Which keeps it cost effective for smaller businesses as far as I can tell anyways. I've signed up and integrated my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. I'm reviewing several social media software for start-up as we want it will be a very social brand. There are a couple of great companies out there which are my favorites so far such as AgoraPulse, MavSocial and Woobox but I believe Klout makes this list because it offers seriously awesome content curation and scheduling features to all of the networks we want to utilize, some of the social media components in supposed social media marketing softwares are oddly lacking Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, LinkedIn and others. The software and user interface is very easy to use and learn. You can get going quickly. I really like how everything loads very quickly and presents information and data using a clean, straightforward presentation and design. I also like how the integrations are basically completed in two or three clicks. You don't have to build any apps or get API codes from these social media networks and so on. If you have LastPass or RoboForm enabled you'll find you can sync up all of your social media accounts in under five or ten minutes which is great because it's a hassle otherwise.

I wish pricing was transparent in their sales copy but judging by their marquee clients it's not inexpensive. It's too bad you have to choose either your Facebook page or profile and cannot have both working in your favor at the same time. Lithium, the company behind Klout has a whole range of complimentary products plus their API available in their premium pricing plans but you must contact them to get a custom quote for this. I had signed up for free and at the time, it stated 'Post scheduling is currently unavailable. Sorry for any inconvenience.' So I never found out if it was usually available or not. But this page nor any page I could find say what Klout's price range is in my research. I read by one anonymous reviewer that it was ten thousand as a fee at the time to promote your product plus you had to pay for the actual perk while basically hoping that influencers will promote you. So if you have a killer, very well established brand with analytics connected to your app or landing page or website and a complete sales funnel in place to utilize when you engage influencers, and the ability to eat large costs for something that is hard to measure your monetary return on investment with you do well to utilize the Klout score as a way to learn about these very well.

If you're a small business in need of content curation, scheduling and posting as well as audience targeting and reporting than this is a great tool as it has been developed a lot since I initially signed up a few years ago. It's an enterprise level platform certainly and I hope to utilize it moving forward but currently, I believe it is beyond the financially scope of our start up.