One of the most common questions we get here at Klout (besides “can you raise my score?”) is “why isn’t my score updated every day/hour/minute?” Obviously we love that people care so much about their Klout scores. It’s exciting when you are retweeted by an influencer or gain a dozen new followers and it’s natural to want to see how those actions are reflected in your Klout score.
We approach our measurement of influence from a scientific background and rigorously test our scores to ensure that they are accurate predictions of actions like conversations, retweets and link clicks. This process takes time. We are not just adding your follower count and dividing it by the people you’re following. There is significant analytical processing behind every Klout Score. In fact, Klout measures how much you influence or are influenced by every single person in your social graph. We also semantically analyze all the messages and links you share to understand what you are influential about. As the standard for measuring influence, we believe every interaction and message needs to be analyzed in depth to generate an accurate measurement.
Most people would agree that social media is rife with people trying to “game the system”. We value consistency over sudden spikes as a means to verify a person’s influence. The Klout Score isn’t meant to be updated on a hourly or daily basis and we believe that this is a good thing. Just like Google doesn’t change your page rank after a single blog post or you would never expect your credit score to change after paying a single bill, we do not believe a single retweet from an influencer should significantly impact your score. Every time we process your score we look back over the last 30 days to generate a holistic view of your activity and overall influence.
Our goal with the Klout Score is to provide end users, companies and everyone within the social web a robust and extremely reliable means of understanding the influence, authority and reputation of individuals. This means performing rigorous analysis that does take time, but also using time as a method to verify how influential a person really is (sustained action is more valuable than a brief spike). While this can be frustrating in the short-term our hope is that everyone will benefit from this approach through the more accurate Klout Scores that it produces.
