If you talk to certain people who are on social media you might hear them say ‘I’ve a Klout score of 50’. What is this and should you even care?

Klout is an analytical website/app that analyses your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Bing, Klout & Wikipedia usage and determines your perceived ‘influence’ on social media.

It does this by looking at your following count, follower count, retweets, list memberships, spam and dead accounts following you and much more besides to calculate the ‘size’ of your social media network and then correlates this with the content you’ve created and measures how other users interact with that content. Then, after a bit of analytical alchemy, it gives you a ‘Klout score’ of between 1 to 100. The higher the number the more influence and reach you’re perceived to have within the social community.

Your Klout scores are supplemented with more specific measures:

True reach

The size of your engaged audience who actively engage with your messages.

Amplification

The likelihood that your messages will generate actions, such as retweets, mentions, likes and comments.

Network impact

The projected influence value of your engaged audience.

Klout has suffered from some bad press surrounding its privacy policy and Klout algorithm in the past – most famously Barack Obama, President of the United States, having a lower influence score than a number of significantly less influential bloggers! Thankfully these issues have been mostly resolved and the platform is attempting to rebuild its credibility.

In a recent move Klout, largely due to it’s partnership with Bing, now also presents you with a list of shareable content that it thinks you might be interested in sharing. This obviously is nothing new if you use SproutSocial or similar scheduling service, but unlike these, Klout auto populates these for you – which makes it that bit quicker to share or schedule content to your followers.

So what can Klout offer your business?

Businesses can pay for ‘Klout Perks Campaigns’. Essentially, for a fee, businesses can offer free services or products to other Klout users who match a pre-defined set of criteria including scores, topics, and geographic locations – with the hope that those users (otherwise known as ‘influencers’) will advertise the service/product across their social media accounts. It’s important to note though, that Klout users who receive Perks are under no obligation to write about them – so for the company it’s a bit of a gamble.

In a further development Klout has begun displaying business related analytics aimed at helping businesses and brands learn more about their online audiences.

Conclusion

So is it worth worrying about your Klout score? The answer is… probably not. It might help inform you of your social ‘reach’ and the ‘Perks’ might aid you in publishing interesting content but it’s not going to make or break your business. Find out more about Klout at https://klout.com/home.

If you want any help with your social media influence get in touch with me at http://paulkirkdesign.co.uk