Do You Have Klout?
[by Richard Harrington]
One of the hardest parts about being diligent in your social media efforts is the feeling that you aren’t really accomplishing anything. Sure a few Likes or Retweets may give you a temporary belief that you “matter”. But it’s really hard to know if you’re making any real progress.
Fortunately there’s Klout.com which you can track your progress. The service is totally free to use and has been around since 2008. Essentially you can connect several social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and more (but only one account from each). You can also link several blogging platforms as well as photo sharing services. Why all these connections? That’s simple, for measurement.
Klout essentially measures your online influence from your social networks. This means you can see where you’re making the needle move. For example it measures these:
- Twitter: Retweets and Mentions
- Facebook: Comments, Wall-Posts, Likes
- LinkedIn: Comments, Likes
- Foursquare: Tips, To-Do’s, Done
- Google+: Comments, Reshares, +1
Every day you get a status report via a score. The average score is 20, but it ranges up to 100. This can be really usefully to gauge your online influence.
Klout also identifies topics it feels you are influential on. This is not based on how much you post, rather its how much your content is getting amplified.
You also can see where you’re having the most influence and even compare your online reach to others.
The service is a very useful way to track progress in the online world. I find it most helpful to view my Influencers section Both to see who’s most interested in my content as well as who I am influenced by in regards to social media. This section helps you determine your best online allies as well as potential customers.
Feel free to dig in to my profile – http://klout.com/#/rhedpixel/- and then compare it to yours. Look at some of your colleagues and start to put the connections together. Information is truly power and it really helps to track your progress over time.
Richard Harrington is the founder of RHED Pixel, a visual communications company in Washington, D.C. You can read Rich’s blog at www.RichardHarringtonBlog.com as well as follow him on Twitter @rhedpixel. To learn more about time-lapse, HDR, and panoramic photography, explore www.3Exposure.com. If you’d like to check out his books, just swing by his Amazon page.
3 Responses to 'Do You Have Klout?'
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Let me start first by saying in no way are my comments intended to show disrespect. I’ve always enjoyed your writing and expertise with video. That being said I have to strongly disagree with your take on Klout and its significance.
Klout is inconsistent and irrelevant unless you like to view random numbers to feel better about yourself. The best indicator of your success with efforts on social media is your direct feedback with people… as in online “social” interaction. An algorithm spitting back a number to you about your cumulative activity online is useless. If you’re looking to gauge the success of your activity you should be doing so by mapping your level of online activity to business relevant statistics such as lead generation, traffic spikes, conversion to sales, increase in newsletter/blog subscribers, etc.
I’ve been on Klout since its launch and it has told me nothing of value. Algorith updates happen and inexplicably my rating drops 25 points for no reason with no change in activity. If you’ve found business applicable value from Klout please do share, but from what I’ve seen its nothing but an ego stroke and an engine for them to link you to special deals or as they label them “Goodies”.
Let me further add that Social Media activity should be done not to attain clout or influence, but to accomplish a tangible business goal. If you’re social media activity is intended to enrich or grow your business you’re wasting valuable time if you’re not tying your social media activity to a specific business goal. I have long been a proponent of social media, have embraced it, recommended it to my blog readers for as long as social media has existed and truly believe in it, but paying attention to a Klout number as a meaningful indicator of your online success is a mistake and a distraction.
One thing I might add about Klout. For those that do use it and pay attention to the numbers… it can impact others perception of you. Unlike using the tool as a self-analysis tool this is an instance where people are using it to base a judgement about you. Klout does not have a high rate of adoption yet and there are several other companies trying to come up with solutions that accurately reflect user trust, expertise and popularity. By and large my dissatisfaction with Klout is unswayed even with this aspect of its use by others. Why? Because content and word of mouth by others will always trump a number that conveys some arbitrary ranking of social media expertise and trust.
One’s time is better spent building relationships with social media than padding activity to boost a number for a site like Klout.
This article completely overstates the value of Klout. Yes, it is important to monitor your reputation on the various social media sites, but to measure and assign some arbitrary rating is ludicrous. Klout was already silly, and then they added badges. As soon as they did that they proved that it was more about gaming the system to get a high number than it was any true indication of social relevance.