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Influential or Influential on Klout? Now you can have both...
Andreas Batsis / Thursday, August 23, 2012 / Categories: Inbound Marketing

Influential or Influential on Klout? Now you can have both...


Your Klout score shows how good you really are at... Klout! A few days ago this used to be true!

The Social Potential

Social media is here for good! Of course most of the people spend usually their social time just for fun. Finding the next boyfriend, talking to the hot chick and commenting on our friends vacation photos is a good enough reason for the majority to spend hours after hours in Facebook. And IMHO there is nothing wrong with that.

Consider the alternatives of the in-house entertainment. During the past years those alternatives not only were very few but they also stinked. The Media! That is the TV and the Radio. The TV! One-way messages from a cold transmitter heading to the receiver with limited or no choices. Limited transmission frequencies, granted to controlled operators who are connected to the political system and the power. Limitations in general! What would you choose? A bunch of TV channels with a fixed program, usually of low quality and under heavy censorship, where no contradiction is allowed? Or a social community where you select your own friends in thousands, each of the friends being a physical channel of information and conversation are on fire? We call it Facebook. And this is only one of the social media. Multiply the potential with the number of the units: Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin, Pinterest (the next big thing), Youtube, Buzzfeed, Tumblr, blogs etc. and you will get the big picture. Quality briefings and education, interactivity and social connections in the distance of the keyboard!

The cultural shift is obvious. Anyone with an internet connection has now the ability to escape the guidance and enter the world of his own two-way influence. We get influenced while at the same time we influence other people.

Influence

According to the dictionaries influence has everything to do with effect, steering, prestige, imposing power! To cut the long story short, influence measures the importance of my words and my actions.

There is web a tool since September 2009 that is used to calculate our influence in the field of social networks. It’s the well known Klout. Till last week, there was a semi-joke semi-truth statement around the internet marketing world, the one mentioned in the beginning. Your Klout score shows how good you really are at... Klout! Not far from the truth. There used to be articles teaching the way to a higher influence score, like influence is a quality that goes up and down! Check it here: 6 Ways to Raise Your Klout Score.

I personally have used Klout a lot, especially when checking the reach of my social content, but to also check many social profiles regarding the type of content, the style, the potential thought leaders etc. I have tested many ways to a higher Klout score, for example light posting vs heavy posting, links vs plain statuses, and the conclusion was always this:

  • You could change your Klout score up and down very easily! (I have managed to increase mine by 5 points in five days)
  • The old Klout score was straight proportional to the number of posts and updates in our social media and less depended on the quality of responses and the general acceptance of our social presence.

Hmm, let’s not forget that influence is not about how often I talk! Influence has everything to do with how much people depend on what I say, so far as to even change their personal views! There is no significant meaning in an influence that is high in the first week, low during the next week and reaches the skies by the end of the third week.

This is why I always thought that the best metric about influence is the really simple index in Twtrland with the name Gets Retweeted every # Tweets. Unfortunately, this particular index gives us estimates only for Twitter.

Changes in the Estimates of Influence

14th of August, 2012 and Klout announces 3 major updates when calculating influence.

  1. 4 times more signals are taken into account! “We have gone from 100 signals we measure to over 400, and added a new source, Wikipedia…+k has also been added to the overall score” said Fernandez. Wikipedia is strongly attached to both the offline and online reputation while +Ks are not exactly simple social interactions but rather an acknowledgement on your influence itself!
  2. New Klout interface provides now a timeline with the social interactions so that anyone can get a clue about the content that influences people, and the one that doesn’t.
  3. Users are now allowed to approve the topics that they are associated with.

First impression of the new Klout functionality? Definitely positive! But what about the credibility of the influence score?Let’s answer that in an indirect way. During the test of one and a half week:

  • The new Klout score does not change easily!
  • Twtrland profiles with a Gets Retweeted every # Tweets less than 1 (high influential), which in my opinion is a rather accurate indicator, are now on fire! 3 examples (and I have tested more than 80):
    1. Barack Obama: Gets Retweeted every 0.01 Tweets. His score skyrocketed to 99, after his previous 94. Whether we like it or not, the president of the United States is influential by default in almost every corner of the rounded earth. In the same time Justin Bieber dropped from the ultimate top of 100 to the new score of 92 points, when all he does in Twitter is engaging in the conversation. Retweeted?
    2. Timothy Ferriss: Gets Retweeted every 0.2 Tweets. The updates in the Klout algorithm changes promoted Ferriss with an extra 12 points landed him to 81.
    3. Techie Chan: Gets Retweeted every 0.51 Tweets. This is a rather strange profile, anything but social! A famous Greek blogger, well known for his simplified, yet very accurate political analysis and the excellent political forecast. He is not in the social media game, he does not comment in other blogs, he tweets once a week, and yet his articles travel through the Greek social media and blogosphere like particles in the Large Hadron Collider.

Conclusion

We are now part of the transmitted information, either by sharing or by leading the thoughts and in that sense metrics of influence are of great importance.

The new Klout is easy, it carries a lot of useful information and, other than that, Klout algorithm seems to provide much more accurate estimates of the real influence. Get your free Klout account today! All you need is a Twitter or a Facebook account. Connect your other social profiles as well (Google Plus, Linkein, Blogger etc.). This will help you recognize your position in the social internet. It will help you recognize perception! So that you will trim your strategies accordingly. The Klout score is now a very important metric!

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