Lately, I’ve tried out some new tools to increase my social media space, all with varying degrees of success.

I first heard of Klout through my Twitter feed when someone posted their klout scores. I knew immediately that I had to go and take a look-see.

What is klout?

It’s an online tool that people use to measure their influence on Twitter. It’s fairly simple and easy to use. Just sign up at the klout website, enter your Twitter ID, and within a day you have a detailed report. Here is a brief screenshot summarizing my report:

My Klout scores

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the summary tallied closely with my estimate of my Twitter presence. However, I find the little square in the figure above unnecessarily complicated. It does not really in any way reflect the text on the right. But, other than this little crib…I like my score, and I like the methodology by which klout has arrived at the score. They don’t just count the number of followers or even the number of tweets. They basically look at the response generated by each tweet, which sounds eminently sensible to me. It weeds out spammers, and hopefully those folks who are tweeting just for the sake of increasing their klout.

However, for an amateur blogger/tweep like me…using klout doesn’t seem to make too much sense apart from a purely curiosity value. But for professionals looking for business opportunities, it seems like a useful tool to track your effectiveness. However I know I’m not going to be tracking my score all that often.

Foursquare: I knew all about Foursquare for a long time of course. I just didn’t realize that I could use it effectively in India as well. However, my local Coffee Day disabused me of that idea. A large poster announcing discounts for Foursquare users (based on the number of check-ins) prompted me to try this out. Cafe Coffee Day is apparently offering 15% discount for users who have checked in 3 times into the same outlet. If the user is a Mayor of that outlet, Coffee Day serves them with a free coffee and a 20% discount on every 3rd check-in from that user.

Note: The offer is currently available only in Bangalore outlets.

Anyway, back to the topic of Foursquare. The physical incentive offered by Coffee Day prompted me to sign up, but I quickly realized how useful Foursquare actually is only during my recent trip to Chennai. The iPhone app rocks! If I am wandering around and realize I am hungry, I can quickly check out outlets close by, along with reviews of users who have already checked in there. Cool! Checking in to every place I go is fast becoming an obsession…what with all the unlocking of different badges that are available…and of course, let’s not forget the monetary incentives that I am sure more outlets will start offering .

I am still playing my way around it though, and am still too wary to check in when I am actually at the place. Just some vague sense of insecurity…not sure whether it is very wise to do so especially on empty highway spots, or during late night jaunts. I am looking to enhance my friends circle though, and hopefully can get more use out of it than I presently can.

And last but not the least, I have become addicted to Instagram. This is again an app that I downloaded and now use to post photos onto my Twitter feed. I love the ease and simplicity of the app. All I need to do is take a photo, apply an appropriate filter from the filters list (I could do with more variety of filters though), and there I have a nifty edited photo with an appropriate caption. Uploading that to Twitter/Facebook/Posterous/Tumblr is as simple as enabling it once through the configuration settings. So cool and easy to use.

I like the effects, and it’s making taking pictures (something of a chore normally) fun to do. The photos come out looking great, and if not great, well…the Instagram effects will more than adequately camouflage the inept photography ). What’s not to like? Well, nothing at all in my view

Have you tried any of these tools? What are your thoughts/opinions? I would love to know.