I’ll admit, until a few days ago I had no idea what a Klout score was. I knew I had heard of it, I knew I had one and I knew that to some people, it really mattered. So I set out a quest to find out exactly what the buzz was all about. I first decided to start by finding out what my Klout score was and go from there. To start, I went to Klout.com and connected my Twitter account. Then I was able to connect everything from Facebook to LinkedIn to my Klout account so they could get a true measure of what my social media influence is.
Klout measures your influence based on the following criteria:
- True Reach: How many people you influence
- Amplification: How much you influence them
- Network Impact: The influence of your network
I went through the process, connected whatever I could think of and click to find out my score. 10. I thought this was great! I had a score of 10! I was an influential rock star! False. This score rangers from 1 to 100 so literally, I was at the bottom of the totem pole. I was crushed. I sincerely thought that I had more of an influence on the social media world! Sure I don’t have the most Twitter followers and yes, recently I went through a Facebook friend “cleanse” leaving me with a little over 200 friends. But people liked my statuses! I had retweets sometimes! This Klout score seemed ridiculous! So in all reality, what does a Klout score actually mean and should you be worried or even care?
Well, if your goal is promote your business, cause, organization, etc. then I’d say yes, to an extent Klout is important. It goes deeper than just how many people you’re friends with or how many connections you have on LinkedIn. As stated earlier, they measure influence. It’s much deeper than a popularity contest and isn’t just a race to see how many likes you can get before everyone else. It’s about reaching out, making connections and creating conversation. Therefore, if you’re wondering how well you or your business is doing in this aspect Klout scores are a great indicator. I urge you to log-on to Klout and find your score and if you score isn’t as high as you’d like it to be, reevaluate your approach to online networking.
Here are some simple tips to improve your Klout score:
- Use pictures: Consider signing up for a program like Instagram. Pictures are one of the best ways to tell stories. Visuals make a huge impact and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words! We recently published a blog called Tell Your Story With Instagram that offers some insight on how to use it effectively.
- Make your tweets easy to read and interesting: Klout actually measures how many times your handle is used on Twitter and will base part of its score off that. Don’t just post robotic tweets about liking your Facebook page. Share a new blog you like, retweet a friends tweet about a promotion or share a video from your companies latest event.
- Give all your accounts a little TLC: Because Klout can connect all your accounts on most social networking sites, make sure you’re not neglecting your accounts and if you are, considering deleting it because it all reality it’s not doing much for you.
- Develop relationships: Not to be cliche or beat a dead horse, but this cannot be stressed enough! Taking the time to thank someone individually for a retweet, interacting with someone who likes your Facebook status, comment on a YouTube video you love – these will all not only improve your Klout score but your relationships.
These are just a few simple things you can do this week to not only your Klout score, but also get you to reevaluate your online approach. If you’re having trouble with making that connection with your online community, take a minute to read Twitter Lesson From a Lake Creature for some helpful tips!
What have I learned? I need to put a little more time and effort into reaching out and creating a bigger presence in my online community! Maybe one day my Klout score will reach that magically 80-100 range…but until then, you can find me tweeting, posting and blogging away!
