The Official Klout Blog

With the election looming close, we wanted to answer the question “How well does the candidate with the most Klout correlate with who’s winning in the polls?” Naturally, a candidate’s Twitter influence can only tell one part of this story, but it made sense to us that winning candidates would have more engagement, amplification, and generally a higher score. We chose seven races from across the country (before checking how they matched up with our theory) and then compared the candidates Klout Scores with their poll numbers. Here are the results:

MATCH

NOT A MATCH

MATCH

MATCH

Exact Klout Score Numbers: Rick – 42.39, Alex – 41.91

MATCH

NOT A MATCH

NOT A MATCH

In 4/7 cases Klout Score predicted the current leader in the polls.  This is not a scientific study by any means, but just a way to start a conversation. It was interesting to note that Klout held up just as well across party lines even though Democrats typically do better in social media. Furthermore, in the cases where Klout was not a good predictor, the losing candidate was nevertheless a national figure in some way.

How well do you think Klout Scores and polling numbers correlate overall? How do you think it varies across the country? We actually didn’t include any races from California here, but one could imagine that in areas where Twitter was more common (i.e. San Francisco), you might see a higher correlation between the candidate with the most Klout and the winning candidate.

Polling numbers and Klout Score numbers from Thursday last week, when we put this together.