Social Media Report: Klout Who Has Social Media Influence

Social media has its place in the everyday lives of every tech-literate individual, savvy user or a starter bud, young or the elderly, man or woman in this age. Regardless of their geographical location, social media has had its impact on almost everybody’s life. It has become an essential communication platform and, if you may, a bridge to gather information.

The perception of creating a post by a user that will be read, looked at, talked about and shared by other users is considered as influence. Imagine typing in a certain message that is likely to be ‘followed’ by many. Experiences or responses surrounding that specific ‘followed’ message will then again be ‘posted’. In social media, when the users create content and some number of the user’s friends get to notice is a cycle of the story. Acting out on the said content such as clicking an interactive button (as in the ‘like’ icon in Facebook), starting a discussion on it in comments box, and even passing on to further users (like using ‘re-tweet’ in Twitter) is another story. All of these can be grounded and measured on one site. It is through the use of Klout. So what it is then? How does Klout work and how does it tap on our social accounts?

Klout is an internet-based application that can be accessed through a computer or a mobile device. It uses social media analytics to rank its users based on its online influence through the social media applications in which the users utilise. It devises a 'Klout Score' that determines the social media engagement and analyses created content by the users to measure how other users interact with the said content. Photos, videos, text articles, audio files, music, one-liner messages and basically anything that is being shared online or via the internet are considered content. This content determines the data points. Klout score is given as a numerical value between 1 and 100. Users with high Klout scores are deemed to have more influence on social media.

Source: expertbeacon.com

Just like it is in all social media sites, users also need sign-up at Klout. To make the work of the user easy, registration can be done either using Facebook or Twitter accounts. Multiple social media accounts in various networking sites are registered to the Klout account. It uses the following social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Flickr, Tumblr and Instagram. In using these sites, data points are generated and using set algorithms, Klout Scores are obtained. Like for example in Twitter, the world’s leader in micro blogging, where users types in one message that has a maximum of 140 characters, the Klout’s measure of influence in this networking site is obtained through the use of data points that will be coming from the count of followings of that said content, count of user’s number of followers, re-tweets or content re-posts, list memberships, number of dead accounts or spam that are following you, and unique mentions of the user or topics mentioned. With this information, data is blended with the number of other social media networks followings and interactions to come up with the Klout Score. This brings the question: how effective is Klout in other sites that are not necessarily social networking sites?

Aside from the social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest, Klout also uses the search engine sites such as Wikipedia and Bing to get data points. It is also possible to gather data points from the video sharing site – YouTube; blog postings sites such as Blogger or WordPress; and even the music recommendation site – Last.fm. How can Klout be helpful with all these computed points?

Klout with its underlying statement “We’re helping millions of people unlock their influence and grow their Klout” has its way of helping the social media user to know how much they could increase their influence on a known audience. Klout scores are supplemented by three nominally specific measures. These are, as Klout labeled it, True Reach, Amplification and Network Impact. Consider these as Klout’s tool of measuring the influence. So how do these tools work?

The first Klout measure is the True Reach. It is based on the user’s engaged audience who actively participates in the user’s messages or content. This can be further illustrated in Youtube’s number of views, likes, dislikes or comments. It can also be illustrated in Facebook likes, comments, shares and in group posts as the number of users who saw the posts in the 'Seen by' section. The second tool used by Klout is the Amplification. The Amplification score is about the likelihood of one’s message to generate actions. This can be most effective through the use of hashtags (#topics), re-tweets, and mentions in most of the social networking sites like Twitter, Foursquare and others. The third tool used by Klout in generating the score is the so-called 'Network Impact'. This reflects the computed influence value of a person’s engaged audience. Now with all these tools, how can a user increase his or her Klout score?

One way to increase a user’s Klout score is to include all the information about the specific user’s other networking accounts. This is to mean that every user should add his or her various networking accounts to his or her Klout dashboard. It is only through this way that Klout will be able to gather or compute data that will be generated by the interaction of the user in Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, Wikipedia, Bing, Blogger and WordPress. Klout plans on adding up or partnering with more networking sites in the near future.

Klout claims that their ‘influence is big’. In their site, it is mentioned that Klout has over 400 million scored users, 200 TB of data being processed daily, over 200,000 businesses using this platform, 1 million Klout Perks being delivered, 12 billion daily social signals and 50 Billion plus API calls monthly. The fact that they have a unique value proposition makes them stand out in the market. Who knows? It could only be a matter of time before a Klout profile becomes a necessity for webmasters all over the world.

Written by TeamSMF

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