Klout is a popular online tool that shows you your combined social media score and can help you find influential people to follow. The main interface screen looks like the picture below. It contains your cumulative Klout score (bigger is better), your Twitter picture, the social networks you’re active on, people that you influence, and the topics you are influential about. The goal is to measure social influence with the social media analytics of Klout and find interesting and influential people to follow on Twitter
It is based on three elements across multiple social networks. The primary elements are…
Network Influence: How often do top Influencers share and respond to your content?
Amplification: Your Amplification is how much you influence people. When you post a message, how many people respond to it or spread it further? If people often act upon your content you have a high Amplification score.
True Reach: Is a unique algorithm that looks at your combined social presence and plots out your combined reach across all networks. Your True Reach is the number of people you influence. When you post a message, these people tend to respond or share it.
These three items combine to give you your Klout score. The score is based on a 100 point system, with the average person’s score in the twenties.
The cool thing about Klout, is that you can easily find people that share common interests and you can see how they influence their respective communities. Here is how I use Klout on a daily basis.
Klout allows you to give other Klout users points in different influence areas. You are allowed to give five points out each day. Here is how it works.
I click on the influencers button on the left sidebar.
This brings me up a list of my top influencers. In this case I have 563 people that I influence, with Kim Garst and Phil Gerbyshak having the highest Klout scores among them.
If I want to find out more about Phil Gerbyshak, I click on his name and it pulls up Phil’s Klout profile. I can see what networks he is on and if he is a Klout member. I can then give him some Klout by clicking on one of the influential about buttons. I can also mouse over his influencer’s icons and see their names, their Klout scores, and their top three influences.
This is where Klout becomes very useful. I can quickly find influential people ranked by score that have similar interests to Phil. By just mousing over the icons, I can tell if they might be an interesting addition to my Twitter stream. Once I find someone interesting, I just click on the icon and it pulls up their full profile.
The first thing I do is read their full bio. If it is someone that I want to follow, I just click the Twitter icon and my Twitter app opens with their profile listed. I click the follow button in Twitter and take a look at their timeline. I can get a good idea of their niche by their tweets. I just tab back over to Klout and now I can give them a Klout boost in a selected influence area. In the example above, Amber Cleveland is someone that is involved with SOBcon, and is very passionate about keeping social media simple.
From the new profile I can find more related influencers to follow. Since I can add five Klout boosts in one day, I usually try and find five new people a day. Since I can see their scores posted on their profiles, I look for people who have a score of 30 or higher and are a Klout member.
Using this technique, I have found some very interesting and influential people in their respective genres. With Klout pulling from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn you can get a very complete picture of their total social media influence.
Klout has recently added other social sites such as Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube to their algorithm. When you sign up, you can add as many site links as you have accounts for.
If you haven’t signed up for Klout yet, take a look at their site, and read more about their service. They also have a very informative blog. As an incentive to sign up for Klout, they offer different perks from different businesses.
Overall, using Klout is a fun and helpful way to build your social media stream with interesting and influential participants. Please share how you use Klout in the comments. (Sending Klout my way is always appreciated!)
Question: What is your Klout score?