I wrote the following article for IFB, an organization dedicated to helping fashion bloggers succeed. The article is remotely high-level, but is a good overview on what Klout is, and the fact that it’s not the end all be all decision maker when it comes to influence.
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Ever since Klout was mentioned on stage at the Independent Fashion Bloggers Evolving Influence Conference (some) fashion bloggers have been trying to figure out what Klout is, and what kind of impact it will have. This post will give you a high level understanding of Klout, and what it should or shouldn’t mean to you.
Before we go any further and you start worrying about how high or low yours score is, there’s something I must say. Engaging your readers and followers and putting out great content… those are factors you should worry about, always. Win in those areas and your Klout will rise.
What is Klout?
In short, Klout is a new company that is assigning users of social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) a score. Without getting overly technical, Klout uses a set of complex algorithms to give you a score from 1 to 100 (higher the score the “better”) that brands can utilize to measure influence. Specifically, they utilize three categories to determine your score.
Klout Categories
With brevity in mind, I’ll keep the definitions for these three Klout categories relatively simple.
- True Reach – the size of your audience that is actively engaged with you.
- Amplification Probability – the likelihood that your messages will get shared (Ex. RT on Twitter, Like or Comment on Facebook) and generate conversations.
- Networks Influence – this is the measure of how influential your followers are and is the hardest of the three categories to control.
Combined, these three categories use more than 35 variables to determine a Klout score, some of which include (this get’s a bit nerdy): Followers, Mutual Follows, Friends, Total Retweets, Unique Commenter’s, Unique Likers, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, @ Mention Count, List Count, List Followers Count, Unique Retweeters, Unique Messages Retweeted, Likes Per Post, Comments Per Post Follower Retweet %, Unique @ Senders, Follower Mention %, Inbound Messages Per Outbound Message, Update Count, List inclusions, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, Unique Senders, Unique Retweeters, Unique Commenter’s, Unique Likers, Influence of Followers, Influence of Retweeters and Mentioners, Influence of Friends, Influence of Likers and Commenter’s
Does the Score Matter?
Rather than ramble on with more technical jargon, let’s address how this score impacts you as a fashion blogger.
- If you have no desire to work with brands and are simply having fun with blogging, your Klout score won’t matter much to you.
- If you aspire to monetize your blog you need to pay attention to your score, as it is one of many elements brands may potentially use to analyze you, as a good fit for their marketing needs.
If you are a 2
If you relate to number 2 from the list above, yes, it’s true that you should pay attention to your Klout score (to an extent). It’s also very important that you not get caught up in sending X tweets per day and sweating when you don’t get Y retweets per day.
For my day job I’m one of those marketing folks that will, at times, need to find influencers for certain categories. When doing so I’ll check a person’s Klout, but I also look at a variety of other factors before listing someone as an influencer.
Things such as the quality of content you distribute and the type of brand ambassador you have been/could be plays a big factor when adding people to an influencer list.
Does Size Matter?
Keep in mind that Klout measures influence, and a person with 400 followers that causes his/her audience to react can easily be viewed as more influential than someone with 5,000 followers that never react. The size of your audience doesn’t guarantee a high Klout score; it’s all about influence (causing action).
In the End
Klout measures influence, but what was said towards the beginning of this post should be what influences you, “Engaging your readers and followers and putting out great content… those are factors you should worry about, always. Win in those areas and your Klout will rise.”
I hope this post has in some way shed some light on Klout. If you don’t know your Klout, but want to, click here to get started.
