To become a master of influence you could always grab a copy of Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: Science and Practice. There is a lot of useful stuff in there that will make you aware of the way you are influenced by marketing every single day. But it doesn’t really help us measuring influence within social networks. One popular solution for this problem seems to be a service called Klout. A score from 1-100 that tells you and everyone else how influential you are on the social web.
How does Klout work?
Klout is a metrics that says to represent your social web influence. It is mainly based on Twitter, but you can also connect your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to get a more refined score. But before you start using a metric like Klout in your social media monitoring analyses you should always follow a simple rule: truly know and understand what this metrics really means. Somebodies Klout Score can be 28 or 58, but how is this metric calculated? What does it mean if somebody has a higher Klout score? The answer is not as simple a you might have hoped in the case of Klout, but there is a clear explanation of Klout and how your score is measured on their website.
Klout is based on three calculated metrics: True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Influence. To calculate these metrics Klout uses over 35 variables. As you can tell, that gets very complex.
To measure your True Reach Klout for example will calculate how far your tweets spread across the social web. It will look at how many people you follow, follow you, the ratio of following/followers, number of retweets, the lists you are added to and how many followers these lists have. This kind a data determines your Klout True Reach.
While reach is important to get your message spread across the social web you also need engagement. The Amplification Probability score represents variables like the amount of unique retweets, unique replies or unique likes. Amplification Probability for example determines if you are retweeted a lot within a small group of people or a lot of different people.
Finally you can improve your Network Influence. Well actually you can’t, because this metric is all about the influence of the people that follow and engage with you. Let’s say it is about the Klout Score of the people that follow you.
These three metrics are combined in that what is called your Klout Score. And while you now know a little bit more detail about how everything is calculated, you still don’t know what Klout really represents. As I explained it, it is still too complex to understand right away. To get to the simple version you need to understand how to improve your Klout Score.
How to improve you Klout Score
Improving your Klout Score is not a simple as following more people or being followed more. The ratio following/followed by is also important for you True Reach. So unfollowing the Twitter accounts you don’t really want to follow will give your Klout score a little boost. It will assume that you need to follow less people to get more followers. Still it is good to get more followers. True Reach is a about the size of the audience you can gather around you. Start tweeting interesting stuff instead of boring stuff and your followers should go up. As will your Klout Score.
To really improve your score you need to do something about you Amplification Probability. This is all about the amount your engagement you generate. Making people react to what you are saying and posting is the way to push your Amplification to a next level. And this is the key metrics to improve your Klout Score because: “The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people.”
What does Klout really represent?
Now you know how to improve your Klout Score you also know what it simply represents. It tells you if people engage with their audience and if their audience is capable of making sure people have an impact. People with a high Klout Score are people that engage with their audience and might have influence. Maybe not because they have 100 followers themselves, but because they are retweeted a lot by the people that follow them and do have 10.000 followers.
Therefor Klout is a great tool for measuring influence, but use it as a guide. The metrics is to complex to follow blindly, but is a great way to filter out those people that never engage with their audience. Maybe the low Klout scores are more important to watch, instead of the really high ones.