True reach is a term that you may not have heard about if you are not involved in social media marketing. If you are, then you may be confused about what it is exactly. I admit, it is difficult to wrap your head around it, but I’ll attempt to make it easier.
The social media metric website Klout uses True Reach to show users how effective they are in using the social media tools at their disposal. The metric primarily measures the following actions:
- Total followers across all social networks
- Number of Likes per post
- Comments per post
- Retweets
Total Followers
This metric is pretty easy to decipher, but keep in mind that Klout only measures what you tell it to measure. In other words, if you are active on Facebook but you don’t allow Klout access to your Facebook profile to measure your activity, then any activity you do on Facebook won’t be measured.
Currently, you can link Klout to the following social networks:
- Foursquare
Soon, you will be able to connect to YouTube, Google+, and Facebook Pages.
I highly recommend that you connect your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles to your Klout profile at a minimum. If you are not using any of those social networks, then join them and connect them to your Klout profile.
Number Of Likes Per Post
When you start getting into specific actions like Facebook Likes, Twitter retweets, and social media comments, things get a little murkier where true reach is concerned. I’ll try to simplify.
Let’s say you leave 20 comments on Facebook today. You have 100 followers. Using the 80/20 rule, 20 of your followers like at least one of your comments. That’s 20 Likes for 20 comments, which is a fairly high number. Based on that, you should see your true reach metric rise to giant-like proportions.
The Klout metric shows you a percentage number that looks like this: .43.
That number represents 43% of your comments are Liked. That’s almost half. So if you were receiving 20 Likes for 20 comments, then your Klout Likes Per Post ratio would be a 1.0. A perfect score.
Comments Per Post
While Likes Per Post is Facebook-specific, Comments Per Post is not. It too is represented by a percentage number that looks similar to the Likes Per Post number. The only difference is that all of your comments across all of your social networks are measured.
So, let’s say you tweet 100 messages, make 100 Facebook status updates and comments on other’s statuses, and leave 100 comments on LinkedIn during one day. That’s a lot of activity. If out of 300 messages you receive 30 comments from your followers on all networks, that’s a 10 percent ratio, or .10 – not so good.
Retweets
Now, retweets. That’s when your Twitter followers retweet your tweets. In other words, they send your comment to their followers.
If you have 100 followers and you post 10 tweets during a day and find that 5 of them have been retweeted by 10 of your followers, that’s a 50% retweet ratio. However, your followers’ followers count. If they total 2,000 among the 10 people who retweeted your messages, that’s a pretty good reach.
Pulling It All Together
So how does Klout pull all of that information to determine your true reach? Your guess is as good as mine, but here’s a theory.
Take an average of your Likes Per Post, Comments Per Post, and retweets and multiply them against your total followers. Example: Your ratio of Likes Per Post, Comments Per Post, and retweets are all equal to 50%. The average, of course, would be .50. Your total follower count among all social networks is 1,000. When you multiply your activity ratios against your total followers, it comes out to 500. That’s your true reach.
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