What Klout Teaches Us about Influencer Reach

Klout’s data science team employs a scalable system that assigns Klout Scores to 750 million user profiles by processing 45 billion interactions daily, and captures 3,600 different actions that then factor into the score.

The Klout motto is "Be Known for what you Love"

I was talking to Alex Stojkovic today, an inbound lead gen Guru in Toronto, who also happens to have his Klout score embedded as his LinkedIn avatar. It's neat, since I also share a mild obsession with dashboards that track your analytics on various social channels. I've always been a fan of Klout, inspite of its fall into disrupte with serious digital marketing & social analytics junkies. 

As imperfect as algorithms are in a world, perhaps the last 10 years in human history, where machine learning, deep learning and AI is still "not that smart". Klout's algo does process a lot of information. You have to play the influencer game to truly reach much above a score of say, 60. 

So what counts on Klout: 

Currently, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Foursquare contribute to the Klout Score as well as Lithium Communities and real world information from Wikipedia.

So maybe like many, you realized your Klout score sucks because you don't actually use Instagram.  Maybe you haven't invested in Twitter. You don't create video content at all? Hmm. 

Anyways, so without further adieu some reading for you guys: Klout Score: Measuring Influence Across Multiple Social Networks

Klout for me: 

• Helps me find influencers
• Helps me tag what I'm writing about, where I'm developing knowledge authority
• Give me props and the opportunity to self-reward based on my social media experience. ("ooo my score just went up 0.4")
• Gives me ideas to curate content 

Boosting your Klout Score

• Be active on all the networks they track
• LinkedIn doesn't/won't boost your Klout score much (Twitter & Instagram will). Annoying if you're a pulse prodigy of sorts. 
• Create quality content
• Do visual marketing & learn how boost your Twitter rates with emotional story-telling and curating content that matters

No okay, maybe not! 

• Build your own community of Influencers (Unfluencers) in your niche
• Network and support others you respect & admire
• Think of social media in integrated marketing terms

 Klout once aspired to be the Q Score of the Internet: a way of tracking reach and influence across the social spectrum. Its algorithm has always been a black box. But the company moved beyond the vanity metrics of social media—things like number of friends or followers—and into deeper indicators of engagement, like retweets. By doing so, Klout tried to become the world’s first and most reliable standard of measuring social influence.

• Connect and curate the content of influencers in the keywords, hashtags and niche markets you want to gain traction in. 
• Research your competitors on Twitter and follow who follows them. 
• Try to get some influence on a couple of niche social channel you enjoy the most. 

Conclusion 

While Klout is a very 2012 trend, I think even in 2016 it remains somewhat relevant. I'm a fan of the perks it gives you too for improving and reaching certain thresholds, some of them are quite valuable as far as these things go. I remember coming across this article, months (or was it years) ago and thinking, how neat it would be if social media managers were actually hired based on their Klout score. Of course, nothing is further from the case. 

What Is Klout?

Klout attempts to measure your online clout--that is, your ability to influence people on the Internet. Using data aggregated from social networks, Klout determines how good you are at persuading other people to act.

I hope you enjoyed our Klout tour, I'm going to have to be going. But for those of us who love social media, our Klout is just the beginning: