Does Klout Carry Any Clout?

By Thomas Judd

Clout: /klout/,

Influence or power, especially in politics or business.

What is Klout?

Klout, with a K, is an online media tool that measures your social media influence by analyzing all of your posts and interactions.

What is Your Klout Score?

The Klout score is a number between 1-100 that represents your influence. The more influential you are, the higher your Klout Score.

Influence is the ability to drive action. When you share something online or in real life and people respond, that’s influence. Their response can be a Like, a Share, a ReTweet, a Favorite…the list goes on. The more influential you are, meaning the more that your content inspires action, the higher your Klout Score.

You can choose for Klout to measure your influence on:

Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Page, Instagram, Google+, Linkedin, Foursquare, YouTube, Tumbler, Blogger, WordPress, Last.fm, Flickr, and Yammer.

To give you an idea, President Barack Obama has a Klout Score of 99. Justin Bieber, who has more than 50 million followers on Twitter, has a Klout Score of 92. Currently, my Klout Score is sitting at a cool 64.

For the non-famous, don’t expect a Klout score over 70. Not that it’s impossible to achieve, but because of the fact that the higher your Score is, the harder it is to raise your Score. Klout algorithms also factor in information from Bing and Wikipedia searches. So, if you’re not very Bing-able or you don’t have a widely searched Wikipedia page, it’s unlikely that you’ll climb to the ranks of POTUS and The Biebs.

Take It With A Grain of Salt

If you don’t have a high Score, don’t go deactivating your social media accounts just yet. The truth of the matter is that your Klout Score isn’t the end-all-be-all of social media mastery. It says a lot about you, but don’t let it define who you are in the social media world. Klout can be manipulated. Even computers and spambots can get scores of over 25.

Klout will allow you to get a good idea about your reach and efficacy, but it shouldn’t be what you base campaign decisions on. A lot of money and power is placed in a public relations campaign so it wouldn’t be wise to be hasty and make decisions based on a high (or low score).

More attention should be paid to analytic sites like Google Analytics or Brandwatch.

For more information about Klout, visit Klout.com. You can download the Klout app in the App Store and Google Play.