I research social media tools as part of my day job, and my latest task has been to find the best social monitoring and listening applications. One site that’s come up again and again is klout.com.

From the website:

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence.

The Klout Score is a factor of over 35 variables broken into three categories; True Reach, Amplification Score and Network Score.

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on the followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential your engaged audience is, also on a scale of 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.

Do you realize what this means? I finally have validation for all my hard “work” online! When I first checked at the beginning of last week I had a score of 40. Then I realized you can link your Facebook account as well. That, my friends, is where my power lies. Bwahahahaha! The first day they synced my score jumped to 46, and as of last night I’m at 50.

I feel powerful ‘n stuff.

The best part is you can type in ANYONE’S twitter handle and see their score. It’s free to join and once you do you can see all kinds of analytics.

What are you waiting for? Go check it out and post your score in the comments.