Klout is a unique social media analytics company that measures a user’s influence across their networks. It collects data from 11 social networks –Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogger, Flickr, Foursquare, Instagram, Last.fm, Tumblr, WordPress and YouTube – and measures the size of a person’s network, the amount of content he creates, the frequency with which he posts, and the people he interacts with.
Klout believes that the number of followers can be deceiving, and so it uses social actions such as comments, retweets, @messages, and likes, to make a decision.
Klout then assigns a score of 1 to 100, where 100 means you have the strongest influence, and 1 being the weakest. Key influencers collect Klout perks in the form of small discounts.
Klout now includes Google+ in their collection and measurement analysis, bringing up their sites to 12. When this was done, some users saw their score increase dramatically, despite the fact that many were not very active. In fact, in a post on Klout’s blog entitled, Do You Have Google+ Klout?, it says that regardless of activity level, no user with Google+ connected will see a score drop. And those who are not connected to Google+ will not be penalized either.
So the question is, does Klout measure influence accurately, and does it really work?
There’s been a lot of negative press lately on Klout, where audience privacy has been questioned along with Klout’s lack of transparency.
Recently, Klout fans were upset in the new Klout score changes. People (myself included) saw scores drop dramatically. For those who have been engaging in social media for a number of years, this can be disheartening to say the least. Klout had much to say about the new features, but judging by the 1400 odd remarks, of which a lot are negative, it’s not going to be well received.
In theory, Klout is a great idea and companies are already trying to figure out how best they can use their ‘influence score’ as a marketing tool. However, there are some flaws to it. One of them is that just like social media can be manipulated (think of those who’ve acquired millions of followers in a short span of time via dubious means), scoring too can be manipulated. So if numbers and followers can’t be relied on to tell us we’re popular, can Klout give us the answers we seek?
Here’s how Klout works:
Klout groups your score into three metrics:
True Reach: How many people you influence. Klout eliminates spam and inactive followers and that leaves you with your ‘true reach’, that audience who show some kind of engagement by reacting to content you post.
Amplification: How much you influence them. Once you broadcast a message, is it amplified? Is it reacted to? Or does it die in cyberspace?
Network Influence: How influential they are. There’s no doubt that your biggest influence can be seen in your network –but how influential are they? This score measures if you’re influencing the right kind of people and if they in turn pass on this influence.
The fact is there is no other social media analytical tool that works the way Klout does. Klout for now is a good indicator of how much you’ve been interacting on your social networking channels. But it is not refined enough to be used as say an employment tool.
It’s hard to ignore Klout, at the same, time, it’s important to bear in mind that Klout scoring is not the only metric that needs to be used when it comes to influencing your audience.
