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Have you actually seen clear and concise benefits from your Klout score yet? Have you seen perks being offered that you could accept and participate in? Klout is a measure of your social media influence and tracks Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter influence giving you an overall ranking or score based on other accounts.
But How Accurate is Klout?
Engagement, replies, retweets and conversations are supposed to be what drive Klout up and you can see people with high numbers of followers have lower Klout than others because they may get the fans/numbers but don’t have the interactivity which indicates influence. What good is having 200k people following you if .0002% will respond if you pose a question or try to tell them how excited you are about a website/product and hope they follow your link?
Klout is supposed to be all about measuring your engagement on social media, you shouldn’t just be a nameless broadcaster and make sure you contribute to conversations to increase Klout. I started having my doubts about Klout and it’s accuracy after doing my own research and reading this post about Klout Score: http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com/klout-score/
@JohnAguiar who is a blogger and social media preneur I follow told me months back one of his ways he gets participating in that he joins trends constantly and is always on the lookout and participating in big conversations where notice and responses are sure to happen.
He manages to do a phenomenal job responding and interacting with over 111,000 followers and still taking the time to respond to each and every person that replies with a question or statement that warrants a response.
So when I see my own Klout score with just over 14,000 followers I can only try to guess how my much smaller account could have such a close matching Klout score.
Logically I try to break it down to what Klout may be looking at that might justify this. I notice I have almost 2x as many tweets (this is probably from my calls for poetry words and blog RSS feeds), plus I heavily use Buffer, JustRetweet, and some other sites to help promote others articles and such, but I wouldn’t consider these interactive but just promotional and shouldn’t be measurements for influence.
I do think that I was able to drive a lot of extra Klout with my giveaway contests going viral and becoming very popular, I have received hundreds of retweets on some articles.
In comparing our Klout accounts, only recently were my metrics higher than his account and I can only assume my contest article promotions were the driving factor.
One thing of interest, you can see that both John and I use Facebook as our primary method of influence. This was pretty interesting because both John and I have WAY LESS followers on Facebook than on Twitter. I have 14k Twitter followers and only about 2,271 friends on Facebook. John as mentioned has 111k Twitter followers and around 4,009 friends on Facebook. This shows you how much more powerful Facebook is at reaching people and influencing them vs Twitter as a Social Network I think if the influence metrics can be believed.
How much clout does Klout really have?
Well, based on my comparisons I am not really sure if Klout is completely accurate in the score it assigns social media entities. I know that I don’t have as broad a reach as John Aguiar who to me has a great command over social media communication and influence. To rank me as highly in comparison when my networks and spheres of influence are only 1/2 as large on Facebook and 1/10th as large on Twitter seems a bit off.
I can’t really explain why my account would be rated the same score, maybe some of my 14k followers are higher quality than those 100k followers but it is unlikely to be that big a difference. So far other than a few extra perk rewards I am not seeing too much benefit from having a Klout score of near 60, my best Perk so far was getting a free copy of Men of a Certain Age Season 1, but haven’t had anything nearly as interesting since.
-Justin Germino
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