Who remembers Klout? The influence app.?
Bal Harbour Shops created an innovative and social-score centric VIP lounge for its Fashion’s Night Out party in Florida. What made the lounge so special? You needed to have a Klout score of 40 or higher to get in. Klout score of over 40? If so, you can come with me to the party. If not, stay at home…
Let’s go back to the 6th Feb 2014 when the new Klout was launched with the hashtag #NewKlout. I recall creating a blog post when Klout had its last major overhaul in Aug 2012.
Did they make changes to the algorithm? Who recalls giving out a +K to people who influenced you?
The process to add +K seemed to have gone under the radar with that update.
Do you recall the Klout achievement badges? I created a blog post about those colorful badges long since killed off.
Klout was always about creating and sharing great content
In Klout you could review articles and select the thumbs up or down bottom to indicate what you want to see more of and less of. You could see the source, date and category of each content item.
Klout used to monitor posts from a mixture of social media (like X (Twitter) and Facebook) as well as a hand-curated list of thousands of RSS feeds from diverse publishers. Klout used to recommend content that was topically relevant and predicted to resonate with audiences.
Content used to appear with a label so you could get a feel of how new it was.
This was an interesting move to supply curated content. There was no advertising on the site, but the Klout Perk program was alive and kicking.
Scheduled updates
You could schedule posts.
Klout score – “moments”
Users could see a list of posts that contributed to the Klout score, “moments”. I had previously described Klout “moments” in detail soon after it was first introduced.
You could also see a breakdown of how your score was calculated: .
The activity shown in the measure section contributed to your Klout Score.
Now we know what Klout really measures!
Here are some of the top signals that Klout measured, as listed by Klout at that time:
- Facebook:
- Mentions: A mention of your name in a post indicates an effort to engage with you directly.
- Likes: The simplest action that shows engagement with the content you create.
- Comments: As a reaction to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
- Subscribers: Subscriber count is a more persistent measure of influence that grows over time.
- Wall Posts: Posts to your wall indicate both influence and engagement.
- Friends: Friend count measures the reach of your network but is less important than how your network engages with your content.
- X (Twitter at that time)
- Retweets: Retweets increase your influence by exposing your content to extended follower networks.
- Mentions: People seeking your attention by mentioning you is a strong signal of influence. We also take into account the differences in types of mentions, including “via” and “cc”.
- List Memberships: Being included on lists curated by other users demonstrates your areas of influence.
- Followers: Follower count is one factor in your Score, but we heavily favor engagement over size of audience.
- Replies: Replies show that you are consistently engaging your network with quality content.
- Google+ (no longer exists)
- Comments: As a reaction to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
- +1’s: The simplest action that shows engagement with the content you create.
- Reshares: Reshares increase your influence by exposing your content to extended networks on Google+.
- LinkedIn
- Title: Your reported title on LinkedIn is a signal of your real-world influence and is persistent.
- Connections: Your connection graph helps validate your real-world influence.
- Recommenders: The recommenders in your network add additional signals to the contribution LinkedIn makes to your Score.
- Comments: As a reaction to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
- Foursquare
- Tips Done: The number of suggestions you’ve left that have been completed indicate your ability to influence others on foursquare.
- Klout (no longer exists)
- +K received: Receiving +K increases your Klout Score by an amount that is capped in every 90-day measurement cycle to protect the integrity of the Score.
- Wikipedia
- Page Importance: Measured by applying a PageRank algorithm against the Wikipedia page graph.
- Inlinks to Outlinks Ratio: Compares the number of inbound links to a page to the number of outbound links.
- Number of Inlinks: Measures the total number of inbound links to a page.
Settings
In the settings section you could review your connected networks as well as change your email address used by Klout.
The updated 2014 Klout application – Summary
Klout had tried a few ideas over the previous years. From achievement badges, to moments and the +K. In 2014 they launched a lean and mean version with the addition of content that Klout users could share. The fact that there were no changes to the scoring algorithm was seen as a missed opportunity in 2014. There were many shortcomings like not having self hosted WordPress blogs available as a connected account type contributing to the scoring.
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