Klout is a web-based service that measures your online influence. It uses over 35 variables from Facebook and Twitter to determine your Klout Score, which is broken down into True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. Scores range from 1 to 100, with the higher scores representing a bigger sphere of influence.
True Reach is measured the size of your engaged audience. These are your friends and followers that actually read your updates and react to them, either by clicking on and sharing your links, “liking” and commenting on your status updates, or retweeting and replying to your tweets.
Amplification Probability is the likelihood that your content will get shared by your engaged audience to their network. If you consistently share interesting and useful content, and engage with your audience, your Amplification Probability score, which is measured on a scale of 1 to 100, will be fairly high.
Your Network Score, which is also measured on a scale of 1 to 100, is determined by how influential your engaged audience is. If you have friends and followers that aren’t very influential within their own network, your score in this subcategory may be low, but it can easily be remedied by engaging with influencers that are in your niche and have similar interests to yours.
Basically, your Klout Score is an overall measure of how effective you are in being able to get your engaged audience to take action online. These actions are clicks, “likes”, comments, retweets and mentions. Influencers have high scores as they share lots of content and people are more likely to take action on that content and share it.
What’s Your Klout Score?
Head over to klout.com and sign in with your Twitter account. Connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts to get a more accurate measurement of your online influence.
On your Klout profile page, you will be presented with your Klout Score summary, which is broken down into True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Score subcategories. In the top section of the page is a summary of your Klout Score, along with your online achievements that have contributed to your score.
Next up is the Influence Matrix, which tells you what your influence style is, and who influences you as well as who you influence.
Finally, there is the Topic Summary, which gives you an indication of the topics that you’re most influential on.
When clicking through to the next page, your overall score is analysed, along with an analysis for the three subcategories.
Klout is currently working on a new site, which is in beta at the moment, available at beta.klout.com. It’s basically an interface overhaul of the original website, but it also allows you to compare yourself to others and see how you measure up.
According to the screenshot above, I’ve got some work to do to catch up to Chris M! What’s your Klout Score? Do you feel it’s an accurate indication of online influence? Let us know in the comments.
Score 34
You are effectively using social media to influence your network across a variety of topic
Yeh, I find it useful to sometimes look into someones klout, so I can measure how seriously to take them. It’s a great measuring stick in my opinion.
It’s also fun to just try and have more klout than someone else, us humans love being competitive!
@Chris – There is a Klout extension for Chrome at Klout’s beta site, which shows Twitter users’ Klout Scores next to their names in your news feed.
I’ve been playing around with Klout for a while now, and have noticed that my Influential topics include water conservation!
Also, my blog’s dedicated Twitter account has a score of 25 and it runs on auto-pilot.
Klout is an awesome tool, however, it could do with a couple of tweaks to make it a little more accurate.
This will only work once LinkedIn and Foursquare are in it too. And potentially a web search for your name, etc.
But fun for now.
It’s only meant to be for Twitter really, Klout’s been around for a long time though, has generated huge traffic, I think they’re doing an excellent job!
Bundling all the web services (read: social sites) into one place brings more problems than results because of measurability across different social spheres relative to who the person is. The system would need to be too intelligent to represent that data in a way where metrics could be compared :)
I think for it to be a little more accurate, your website or blog should be included. All the relevant data would lead to a more accurate Klout Score.
Mmm, not sure how it’ll use the blog for credibility though, backlinks? Alexa rank? Page Rank? All of these metrics are so dependent on who the person is and what their aim for the blog is. Then again, I guess you could combine an assortment of metrics, like the site does with Twitter, and the combination would represent a fair rounded figure.
Yeh, guess that could work.
Another useful thing would be like Jess said, include the other social networks, but allow people to select which ones they want included in the calculation..