Do you use Klout?

What Is Klout?

Klout is a way to measure your social prowess, it measures how you engage with your followers and friends across multiple social networking sites, as well as how they engage with you. Klout analyses this information and gives you a score of between 1-100. Klout is the standard measure of online influence.

Your Klout Score

When you first join Klout, you are invited to link a number of your social network with their site. Doing so does not give them permission to post on your account, so in terms of privacy, connecting your accounts is safe. At the moment, there are about 10 networks to link, from the obvious; Facebook and Twitter, right down to Blogger and Tumblr accounts. There are also a number of other sites which we are promised will be ‘coming soon’ such as WordPress and Posterous.

Klout is able to able to analyse how you connect with others as well as what you are influential about. If you tweet a lot about coffee, then Klout is going to recognise that you are influential about coffee - especially if other users engage with your content. Klout can also measure who influences you the most as well as determine your ‘Klout Style’. For example, my Klout style is a conversationalist which is defined as: “You love to connect and always have the inside scoop. Good conversation is not just a skill, it’s an art. You might not know it, but when you are witty, your followers hang on every word.” There are 16 Klout styles, yours will depend on how often you share and how consistent you are in what you share.

A few days after connecting your social networks, you will begin to see some changes in your Klout score:

There are a number of graphs like the one above which track your progress over time. You can see that this graph tracks your overall score, other graphs include:

Your overall score depends on all the above factors. Basically, to increase your score, you must be connected with people who engage with your content. The more they like, comment, retweet, etc. the more you will see your score increase. The work that goes in to determining your score has been developed by Klout’s own team of engineers and scientists, so it’s safe to say that your score is a rather accurate determination of your online presence. To find out more about the Klout scoring system, see these FAQs.

What’s in it For Me?

You might be wondering why you would even want to know your Klout score. Well, actually there are a number of reasons why. Of course there is the initial egotistical need which has to be satisfied, you can find out your Klout score and compare it to all your friends and followers and get a warm feeling inside when you realise that your score is much higher, but there are also more interesting uses for your Klout score. 

One interesting place where you might find Klout scores appearing is a CV, that’s right, Klout scores are starting to appear on CVs and employers are using them. Obviously a Klout score of 50 isn’t going to sway an employer in your favour if someone else has 3 years of relevant experience, but it may be a deciding factor in candidates who are very similar. Expect Klout scores to become more important in jobs based around social media.

A rather interesting marketing strategy has been employed for use with Klout scores. Audi teamed up with Facebook and Klout to analyse the scores of Facebook users who liked an Audi USA – 24 Hours of Le Mans page. Users with an average Klout score received some rather stunning wallpapers of, as might you might have expected, Audis, whilst users with a higher Klout score were actually invited for test drives. As Klout grows, you can expect to see many more marketing strategies like this one.

Remember earlier when I said Klout knows what you are influential about? Well, Klout also offers ‘Klout Perks’, which are offers aimed specifically at people who are influential about certain things. For example, people who are influential about the outdoors are currently invited to join The Clymb where they receive $10 to spend at TheClymb.com. Think about it though – if someone with a high Klout score who is influential about the outdoors receives a voucher of $10, they are likely to Tweet about it and spread the word – generating extra marketing for both Klout and the company in question.

Visit Klout Now

Download the Klout Chrome Extension