While it is not the end-all be-all of influence metrics, I do monitor my Klout score for changes. Yesterday I saw my True Reach score jump from 53 to 61 literally overnight. This was not an accident, and I was not surprised. This article will tell you how I did it. First of all, let's be clear about what "True Reach" means. According to Klout, "True Reach is the size of your engaged audience. We eliminate inactive and spam accounts, and only include accounts that you influence. To do this we calculate influence for each individual relationship taking into account factors such as whether an individual has shared or acted upon your content and the likelihood that they saw it."
My secret was simple. I used social media for what it is design for: I engaged. I began by publishing a new article on Social Media Today: The Web's Best Thinkers on Social Media, called An Idiot-Proof Way to Create a Professional Video for Your Website in Minutes. Then I fired up Tweetdeck and tweeted it. I set up a search for the article title, and then went to work on other projects. Every time the article was retweeted, I fired off a quick thank you for retweeting it, and invited the RT'er to follow my twitter account. I did not automate this process; I sent no form-tweets. Every RT'er got a genuine tweet from me. Of the first 80 retweets, a full 25% of those people followed my twitter account, @_TonyAhn_ (21 people). Compare this to the last article I wrote for Social Media Today, where I did not respond to retweets: in the first 160 retweets, about 10% of those people followed my twitter account (16 people, although there were double the retweets).
If you're a social media consultant, expert, or guru, practicing what you preach and engaging will benefit you as much as your clients. Lead by example, and show them the numbers. There's nothing more authoritative then sharing a successful case study that you authored yourself.
And if you retweet this article, expect to get a personal thank-you from me. ^_^