What Is a Klout Score and Why it Is Important

The Klout score is a metric of your total influence online. The higher your Klout score, the larger and more robust your sphere of influence. The variables that go into calculating a Klout score are interesting and important for business. 

The Klout score is a metric of your total influence online. The higher your Klout score, the larger and more robust your sphere of influence. The variables that go into calculating a Klout score are interesting and important for business. 

Klout scores are calculated from variables on the various social media channels, including Facebook and Twitter, among others. It is measuring True Reach, Network Score and Amplification Probability.

• True Reach: True Reach is the size of your audience (your engaged audience) and is based on your followers and friends who interact with you on a consistent basis.
• Amplification Probability: This is the likelihood that your online messages will promote actions (for example, likes, comments, @messages and retweets); the scale is 1 to 100.
• Network Score: The Network Score is a measure of how much influence your engaged audience has. It is also on a scale of 1 to 100. 

Remember that the Klout Score is closely connected to clicks, retweets and comments. When thinking about what the definition of influence is, it is basically your ability to drive people to take some sort of action. This can be in the form of a reply, comment, click or retweet. Testing is being done on a regular basis to make sure that the average click rate on shared links is tied into a person’s Klout Score. In other words, the Klout Score represents the measure of success that a person achieves when it comes to engaging his or her audience and how much of an impact his or her messages have on other people.

True Reach

As was stated above, True Reach is t he size of your engaged audience. Non-essential accounts (accounts that are not active or spam accounts) are not included in True Reach. Only the accounts that you actually influence are taken into consideration. To look at True Reach in more detail, it is broken down in the following way:

• Demand: Demand is the number of people you follow to build your number of followers and how often those people you follow return the favor.
• Reach: This is how interesting your content is and whether it is substantive enough to increase your audience members, how widely your content has been shared, and how many people are adding you to their lists and whether those lists are being followed.

Amplification Probability

The Amplification Probability is the probability that people will read you content and will take some action as a result. It has to do with your ability to create compelling content that causes other people to respond quickly and positively and to share what you have given them widely. Amplification Probability is broken down in the following manner:

• Velocity: 1. What is the likelihood that your content will be retweeted? 2. Do the same people retweet your content each time or are new people also retweeting your messages as time goes on?
• Engagement: 1. Are you participating in discussions? 2. What sort of diversity does your group of followers have?
• Activity: 1. Are you tweeting the appropriate amount for your audience? 2. Are your tweets of high quality (are you getting new followers, @replies and retweets)?

Network Influence

This is the engagement level of your audience. The way that you can measure engagement is by likes, comments, lists, follows, @messages and retweets. It should be understood that each time a person does one of those things, it is a statement about how great your content is. It is not a simple thing to capture the attention of influencers and people who succeed at this definitely are sharing amazing content. The Network Influence should answer the following questions:

• How influential are the people who follow your lists?
• What sort of influence do the people who list you have?
• How influential are your followers?
• How much influence do your retweeters have?
• What sort of influence do the people who contact you have?

Conclusion

Understanding where you stand as a business owner within the sphere of influence is critical to the success of your business. If you don’t have a way of tracking how much influence you have, you will never be able to grow and change in a positive direction. Of course, it takes time to increase influence and there are many ways to go about doing that, such as making sure that your content is top notch, initiating as many discussions as possible, finding trends that have been around for a little while and reamplifying them and connecting to as many high-quality networks as you can. The Klout Score gives you a solid way to track your influence level so that you can continue to increase it over time.