Klout believes that influence is the ability to drive action! I really like that statement. In many ways the Klout score is maybe the best that we currently have as one metric to measure social media influence.
The Klout score looks at how many people you influence, and by how much, and how influential they are, and it now does that in 12 social networks, and the list is growing. Klout measures not what you talk about most, but the content that gets the most engagement.
There are 3 parts to the Klout scoring system;
True Reach
Your True Reach is the number of people you influence. They filter out spam and bots and focus on the people who are acting on your content. When you post a message, these people tend to respond or share it.
Amplification
Your Amplification is how much you influence people. When you post a message, how many people respond to it or spread it further? If people often act upon your content you have a high Amplification score.
Your Network
Your Network indicates the influence of the people in your True Reach. How often do top Influencers share and respond to your content? When they do so, they are increasing your Network score.
Klout score vs. PeerIndex score
Klout has become one of the most used metrics for any Social media dashboard. I certainly have listed it in many of the dashboards I created following a strategic overview. I also like using the PeerIndex score as well, as that breaks influence down into three main parts, audience, authority and activity. PeerIndex describes itself as enabling us to have an understanding of our social capital. I really like PeerIndex as it also provides a way to compare yourself with your competitors. I will create a post about using PeerIndex later on, but for now, back to Klout!
How to increase your Klout score
There are many theories about how to increase your Klout score. Blocking spam accounts is a great clean up action but does not directly affect the score. The path to success really lies in how you influence others and how they react to your activity. Now that is not so easy to do… or is it?
Klout lists the people that you are influenced by. These are people that are very likely to respond to and share your content. It is all about their reaction to the content that you create. Simply posting more tweets, more blog posts, and more Facebook updates will not increase your Klout score unless people respond and engage with your content.
What are the other new areas of Klout?
Now let me explain some of the other areas that Klout has introduced.
Klout perks
Klout Perks are exclusive products or experiences you earn based on your Klout score. Klout lists the requirements below the Perk. These perks can eventually get used up, and then they become “full”.
Klout topic pages
Topic pages allow you to see the top influencers, top +K recipients and top content for any of the topics currently listed on Klout.com. This is new and I have been exploring these topics for my company and also for me as a Social Media strategist, and a Lighting professional. You can give a +k recommendation to your peers, influencers etc. We all have a daily limit of five +K a day, so be careful who you +K 😉
It is a great feeling when you get a +K from one of your peers so login today and give someone a +K today! Giving someone +K highlights that topic in their profile, so this shows that you feel that those people that you give a +K to are influential for that topic.
Klout Achievements
These are badges that you earn based on your activity. The former ones are described as legacy achievements, and you now see some new funky badges like “The summer of Klout”.
Lists
Great to be added to a list and you can create one as well. It is also possible to import an existing Twitter list into Klout.
I did this, but it seemed that I found a bug as the list was repeated 172 times! This was not nice for the people listed in that list, so I reported this to Klout as a bug. To their credit, it was quickly fixed. I was even contacted by Megan Berry, the Marketing Manager of Klout, based in San Francisco.
Does Klout have any drawbacks?
Please bear in mind that Klout can have some drawbacks, based on the use of one number as a summary of influence. I refer to Jeremiah Owyang’s web-strategist blog post of Feb 21st 2011, where he talks about the Klout score being a “useful metric, but an Incomplete View of Your Customer”. He lists six significant insufficiencies, and I list them here for you, but visit Jeremiah Owyang’s blog link to get the full explanation;
- Alienating your mainstream customers in desire to serve influentials.
- Consumers will game the system –reducing validity of metric.
- Klout is not representative of a customer’s real influence.
- Without sentiment of the influencer –the gauge is incomplete.
- Relying on this single metric alone is dangerous.
- Influence is not a gauge of true buying potential.
In summary – How Can I Increase My Klout Score?
Defining a complex topic like influence with just one number is a tall order, but Klout does a very good job at this. To create balance, I normally almost always track the Peer Index as well. I normally track these scores for competitors as well for benchmarking purposes.
It is not about the quantity, it is about the engagement and interaction with your peers to the content you create. Pay close attention to the three parts of the Klout scoring system, Network Influence, Amplification Probability and True Reach.
If you want to know more, why not attend the #kloutchat on the first Wednesday of every month.
This is one of my favourite quotes about Influence, and is a nice summary to keep in mind…
“My simple answer is to surround yourself with industry relevant and influential people; contribute relevant and great comments to their blogs and updates and provide relevant and remarkable content”.
– Terry Crosby, Social Media Strategist and Trainer – Jan 19, 2011
Do you have your own views about the Klout score and did you have success with actions that increased your score?
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