If you are me 2 days ago, you are asking yourself, “What the heck is a Klout Score?”
While still in Beta, the Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action, as opposed to potentially misleading metrics like follower or friend count. Every time you create content or engage, you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:
If you are me 2 days ago, you are asking yourself, “What the heck is a Klout Score?”
While still in Beta, the Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action, as opposed to potentially misleading metrics like follower or friend count. Every time you create content or engage, you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:
-
- How many people you influence (True Reach)
- How much you influence them (Amplification)
- How influential they are (Network Score)
Your True Reach is the number of people you influence. It filters out spam and bots and focuses on the people who are acting on your content. When you post a message, these people tend to respond or share it.
Your Amplification is how much you influence people. When you post a message, how many people respond to it or spread it further? If people often act upon your content you have a high Amplification score.
And finally, your Network indicates the influence of the people in your True Reach. How often do top Influencers share and respond to your content? When they do so, they are increasing your Network score.
It makes sense. And big name companies are buying into it. Klout has analyzed over 85 million people on major social networks, and is used by over 3000 brands and applications, including Nike, Audi, HP, Disney, P&G, Subway, Fox and Paramount.
So how did iPerceptions do? Check it out:
Score Analysis (You are effectively using social media to influence your network across a variety of topics)
True Reach (You have built a good size network that is highly engaged)
Amplification Probability (You are more likely to have your message amplified than the average person)
Network Influence (You engage with a good mix of influencers and friends)
But the real question is… is a Klout Score of 34 any good? And the answer is, it depends. In the social media sphere, your reach, or “clout” is dependent on the reach or clout of your closest competitors. If the other VoC analytics providers out there have Klout Scores in the 20′s, we’re in good shape; if they are producing scores in the 50′s and 60′s, we’ve got some work to do.
Another thing Klout tells you is what topics you are most influential about. In our case, they were, in order of influence: Branding, Web Analytics, Journalism, Magazine, YouTube, E-Commerce, Search Advertising, Agencies, Dell and Social Media Measurement.
Although the list seems a bit disjointed, when you click on a topic, you can see the top influencers for that topic. Since Web Analytics is the topic that iPerceptions identifies with the most, I wanted to see who (or what) was leading the way in this area.
In the past 90 days, the top ten influencers in the web analytics space were:
Avinash Kaushik – Klout Score: 78
Google Analytics – Klout Score: 63
Stephane Hamel – Klout Score: 58
Jim Sterne – Klout Score: 52
Dennis Mortensen – Klout Score: 50
Emer Kirrane – Klout Score: 48
Anil Baltra – Klout Score: 47
Web Analytics Association – Klout Score: 45
Adam Greco – Klout Score: 44
Yahoo! Web Analytics – Klout Score: 43
It was interesting to note that only two of the top influencers provide web analytics services. All of the others were authors, bloggers and associations. And ones that we associate with! Avinash Kaushik collaborated with us on our 4Q survey solution, both our webValidator and 4Q survey solutions are fully integrated with Google Analytics, Stephane Hamel created WASP – a product we now own, and Jim Sterne is the organizer of eMetrics – a global conference that we sponsor every year.
All in all, I’d say we’re doing alright.
And we have some major social media initiatives lined up for 2012, so it will be exciting to see what our Klout Score is 12 months from now!
Want to calculate your Klout Score? Do what I did! Visit their website at www.klout.com and provide your Facebook and Twitter login information to generate a report in seconds! You’ll be shown your Klout Score, as well as what topics you influence, who you influence the most, and who are the top influencers by topic. You can also see your Klout Style (we’re a “Conversationalist”), create lists and earn achievements. And, like any good metric, you can trend your results over time.
