How Much Klout Does Your Site Have?

What is Klout?

Klout is a relatively new website, that allows people to assess how well they are doing on social networks. This is done using Klout’s very own scoring system, which is based on your activity on certain social media sites.

Your Klout Score

Your Klout score is a representation of your influence online. This score ranges between 1-100, with higher scores indicating a stronger online influence. Scores are calculated using a large number of variables on your Twitter, Facebook,  LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. accounts, to measure and give a good indication of how well you are doing, such as; how many people are following you, the number of comments you receive, number of re-tweets, etc.

Klout makes it easy for its users to understand all of this information by breaking it up into different categories. As well as your ‘Score Analysis‘, you can also view your ‘Network Influence‘, ‘Amplification Probability‘ and ‘True Reach‘ which are all displayed in easy to read graphs.

Klout ‘Score Analysis’

This is your main Klout Score, which is a measurement of your overall online influence, ranging from between 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger online influence.

Klout ‘Network Influence’

This is the influence level of your engaged audience. This is measured on the amount of people who re-tweet you, @message you, follow you, list you, likes, etc. that you have on your social media profiles. Each time a person performs one of these actions it is a testament to the authority and the quality of your content.

Klout ‘Amplification Probability’

This is the likelihood that your content will be acted upon. The ability to create content that compels others to respond and viral content that spreads into networks beyond your own is a key component of influence. So, the more people talk about, re-tweet, comment on your own content, the higher this will be. For example;

• How diverse is the group that @ messages you?
• Are you broadcasting or participating in conversations?
• How likely are you to be retweeted?
• Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?
• Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience?
• Are your tweets effective in generating new followers, retweets and @ replies?

Klout ‘True Reach’

This is simply a measurement of how many people are in your network. The amount of Twitter followers, Facebook Friends and LinkedIn Connections all contribute to this. This also takes into consideration; Followers, Mutual Follows, Friends, Total Retweets, Unique Commenters, Unique Likers, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, @ Mention Count, List Count, List Followers Count.

How Can Klout Help Your Website/Blog?

Now that you know what Klout is and what determines your Klout score, how can this information help? Well Klout can be used as a tool to measure how well you are promoting yourself online. Think of it as Google Analytics for your collective social networks.

The score itself is not that important and you shouldn’t put too much emphasis on trying to get a higher score. More so, use the information provided on your Klout dashboard to asses how well you are advertising yourself on your social networking sites and target areas to improve. This way, you are not improving your score for the sake of having a higher score, but instead you are improving your website. If you can identify where your weaknesses are, you can concentrate more effort on that aspect, which should result in more traffic to your site!

Linking Klout To Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn

When you are setting up your Klout profile it is important to set everything up properly. At the moment Klout currently supports Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn, so you need to authorize the connections with each of your profiles. This will allow Klout to assess you better in an overall sense, rather than solely based on a single social network.

Klout is still relatively new, so more social networks should be added in the future. It is already in the process of integrating FourSquare into its system, with hopefully Google+ and other networks following suit in the future.

Twitter Plugin

There is a brilliant Twitter plug-in for Firefox that you can install. It allows the Klout score to be displayed next to everyone on Twitter. Why would you need this? Well this is a very useful tool that allows you to see at what sort of level other people are at, with particular interest to people that you follow and people following you.

It is better to interact with people of a higher score, as they have a higher online influence than you do. Getting mentioned, or re-tweeted by these people will not only improve your score, but will get your name/content seen by all the people that they influence. The term “Friends in high places” is an excellent way to describe this. If you can build relationships and even friendships with these people, it will help your business in the long run.

Always remember not to get too fixated on this score. Get involved with your entire community, not just people with higher scores, as this shows that you care about your followers.

Please leave your comments below & feel free to ask any questions.