Roy Rogers is a “Persona”

Roy Rogers Restaurants is a persona — at least according to Klout.com, a website that measures influence on topics across the social web to find the people the world listens to. Do your followers re-tweet your posts? Do you actively engage in conversations with them? And with the prevalence of bots on Twitter, how many of your followers are actually real? Klout.com, a start-up based in New York and Los Angeles can give you some answers to those questions.

Klout attempts to calculate your “True Reach” on Twitter. And it can give you valuable insight into who should be talking about your brand or spreading the word about your products and services.

According to Klout, calculating the size of a person’s audience isn’t as simple as looking at their follower count. The Klout engine calculates “True Reach”. True Reach takes into account how active a user’s network of followers actually is. If someone hasn’t tweeted in 3 months it is unlikely they are being influenced by anyone they follow. Klout also evaluates how engaged a person’s followers are. Have they ever @ mentioned or retweeted them? Do they have any common friends and do they talk about the same topics? True Reach allows Klout to go beyond the easily gamed follower count to understand the size of someone’s real audience.

Companies are trying to figure out the social web, and services like Klout can provide valuable insight for measuring the effectiveness of their social marketing programs. You see, when it comes to Twitter, it’s not only about how many followers you have, but how engaged they are with you, and how influential you are with them.

For those of you interested, you can read more about the Klout methodology for measuring your influence across Twitter.