Social influence is simply how people respond to you, your content or your brand on Social media networks. The influence you have on people on Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter etc is a measure of how important they consider you or how interesting the contents you share are. When your actions, feelings, or thoughts begins to affect people in Social networks you are considered “influential” and Klout, a social networking measuring tool used to measure Social influence assigns a score (between 1-100 ) called “Klout Score” on your influence to showcase how “influential” you are on the Social networks.
Your Klout Score is measured by your activities on the Social media networks mostly Facebook, Twitter and Google+ etc. Your Klout score is a measure of how many people are connected with you on the various social networks, how often you interact and how much of your content is shared by people on the social networks. Hence, your Facebook likes, comments, subscribers, followers, Twitter followers, retweets, mentions, Google +1s and reshares are very important if you are to improve your Klout score.
Of what important is my Klout Score?
The Klout Score is just a grading system to determine how influential you are on the Social networks. Just like I said earlier the Klout score is between 1 – 100, the higher the score the more influential you are on the social networks. But of what importance is the Klout Score one may ask?
Just like any grading system, the Klout grading system is a measure to show how important people on the social networks consider you or what you say, a higher Klout score means that people are taking you seriously and responds a lot to the content you post on the social networks. A higher Klout score means you know much about what you are saying.
Look at this scenario, if you have a Klout score of 20 and the other candidate in a job interview has a Klout score of 75, who do you think will be considered for the job of a Social media expert, or online brand manager of a firm?
More recently, Forbes reported:
…Klout is on its way to becoming an integral part of the job search and recruiting process for many individuals and companies.
So you have to take your Klout score seriously if you are to compete with other people who are considered authorities in their area of interest. Even as bloggers we need to be mindful of our Klout score, this will show people from outside how seriously we are considered and how popular we are. Your Klout score is your Social Influence meter.
Why is my Klout Score Low and what can I do to improve my Social influence?
There are few reasons why your Klout score may be low and I intend to help you get your Klout score up and improve your Social influence. Klout in a bid to improve their scoring system and to earn more credibility and acceptance has improved the number of ranking factors from 100 to over 400 variables, so the system is even harder to be rigged as used to be. Klout do not just consider the number of friends and followers we have on Facebook and Twitter respectively but consider who those friends and followers are and how you are engaging with them. Pay attention to power influencers in your niche and interact with them occasionally, ask them to retweet your posts or like a picture you posted on Facebook, tag your friends and ask them to retweet your posts etc, this will help your Klout score.
So even if you have a million friends but do not engage with them, your Klout score can still be low. Attracting high influencers to respond to your posts on social networks can really give you a big boast, for example if Justin Bieber retweets your tweet on Twitter, it will mean more than your high school friend doing same. Build relationships with your friends and interact with them always.
Another reason your Klout score can be low is this, getting more retweets from fewer posts will weigh more than getting same number of tweets from more posts, for example it will weigh more if you get 200 retweets from 20 tweets than 200 retweets from 1000 tweets. And if same people retweet your posts everyday it will weigh less compared to when different people retweets your posts every day.
Connect as much Social Networks on Klout as they support, Klout supports more social networks than just Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Linking your accounts to Klout is not as effective as it will be when you really engage on all the linked accounts, try and be active in the social networks you belong and remember to keep such accounts public.
In trying to raise your Klout Score, I think you should know some of the factors that determine Klout score, improving on them will improve your score and thus your Social influence.
Mentions via tag from other people
Likes
Subscriber count
Posts on your wall
Overall friend count
Retweets
Mentions
List memberships
Replies from you to your network
Number of followers
Google+
Comments on your content
+1s
Reshares of your content
Your job title on LinkedIn
Your connections
Recommendations
Comments
Foursquare
Tips completed – the number of suggestions you’ve left at venues that people have actually completed.
+K
+K from your friends now also plays a role in your score. Previously it only influenced what categories you were thought to be influential in, not how influential you were in general.
Wikipedia
Page Importance
Inlinks to Outlinks ratio
Number of Inlinks
Must Read: Tips to Measure Your Brand’s Social Media ROI
Now I hope I have really broken Klout down for you to understand it better and improve your Social influence. Let me hear what you think about Klout, do you think Klout is the perfect tool to measure Social influence? Use the comment form below to share your views about Klout and social influence with me.
While you are on it, you can check me out on Klout.
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Hello Nwosu,
What a lovely and inspiring post you put up here. I have not registered with klout because i don’t really feel its importance. I have heard about it for some years now but neglect its usefulness. Thanks for the eye opener, i’ll surely go try them out and see how it goes…
I am glad you want to join Klout, Klout will really give you an insight into your Social media activities and i hope you follow the guides here to improve your Klout score.
That sounds really cool but I don’t think I’d be interested in that just because I want a job.
I’m just 22 and I do know I’m not ever going to get job or work under someone if I take my online forex trading seriously.
I’m projecting a higher profit by the close of this year.
You are a blogger, aint you? Do you think the Klout score don’t apply to you? Then you must be mistaken, the Klout score is a measure of how influential you are as a blogger and a social media users. Google takes social media activities seriously and do you think Google won’t consider your influence in ranking you?
Hi Nwosu,
Cool breakdown here. I see why Klout can give you clout ;)
On another note, simply doing what you should do can help you gain serious Klout scores without worrying about the metrics. Meet a ton of people, help a ton of people, create good content and your points will go through the roof in no time.
So much hinges on making an impact while providing service.
Thanks for sharing!
Ryan
Thanks Ryan for your comment/contribution. There are over 400 variables responsible for Klout score and just like you said, doing what we are supposed to do will definitely eat a larger chunk of the algorithm.
Hi Nwosu,
Thank you for this interesting article. I did not know about Klout, so I am really glad I came across your post. As soon as I am done commenting I am going to checkout the Klout site and explore it some more.
I am not very interactive on Twitter and only modestly interactive on FB so I know that my score will be low, but at least I’ll have a starting point.
Best regards,
Dita
I hope you follow the guides here to improve your Klout score quickly, glad you found it interesting. Thanks for your comment, visit Netmmediablog again.
Klout? just hearing about it for the first time, it looks great and quiet important for bloggers, i will surely give it a try.
thanks for the post mav.
You are welcome Dami, glad you found the post useful.
This is an awesome post, this is the first time I hear about Klout it looks so promising I will give it a try thanks for sharing brother :D
thank you nwosu for the info. i have heard about klout once but i do not have any idea about it. it is like Alexa Ranking and Page Rank only Klout focuses on how we are influential in social media networks.
but you have mentioned wikipedia. i thought Klout is all about social media. what is with Wikipedia?
Thank Anis for your comment have an awesome Sunday
Klout calculates multiple pieces of data from several social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Foursquare etc and also real world data from blaces like Bing and Wikipedia, then the collected data are applied to their Klout score algorithm and the resulting number is your Klout Score.
Nice article, surely i will use it,
Thanks.. Thumbs up…
Thanks for your comment, glad you wanna try it out.
Klout…..to measure my social influence, as i am commenting i am giving it a try although i don’t think i’ll receive a high score but at least it will help me focus more on my social media activity. Thanks for the info.
Klout can totally be gamed but I think it may start becoming more and more important. It’s pretty easy once you actually go into someone’s twitter account to verify if their cloud score actually reflects what they do there.. With that being said I still don’t understand some of the stuff klout does like comments per post etc.
Klout has not been adopted anywhere as a standard for social influence but like the article said, the developers are working really hard to fine tune the algorithm and maybe just then Klout may gain more acceptance and credibility.
Well i hope the points discussed here can help you improve your score.
Thanks for telling me more about Klout. I had always wanted to know more about it- its great to know all I need to at one place.
Thanks for that, buddy!! :)
Thanks Ambika i hope you can now join Klout and follow the guides here to improve your Klout score.