This is part two of our Understanding the Klout Score series, today we’re taking a detailed look at what goes into the Klout Score.
Klout measures your influence online. We measure influence primarily as the ability to drive others to action. When you produce content online, we look at how your network responds to that content.
Klout takes in data from social networks and gives you an overall Score based on your online influence. We get this data from public networks (such as your Twitter profile) and any other networks you’ve connected to Klout (such as Facebook and Google+). We process about 3 billion pieces of content and connections daily to give you a new, accurate Score each morning.
We are only able to give you credit for the influence we can see, so if you have a private network that isn’t connected to Klout it will not be counted in your Score.
Currently, we actively measure five networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Google+. These are just some of the actions Klout uses when determining your Klout Score:
-
Twitter: Retweets and Mentions
-
Facebook: Comments, Wall-Posts, Likes
-
Google+: Comments, Reshares, +1
-
LinkedIn: Comments, Likes
-
Foursquare: Tips – Todo’s and Tips – Done
You can also connect Facebook pages, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com, Last.fm and Flickr accounts. These networks do not impact your overall Score yet. Before a network can be fully integrated into the public score it must be rigorously analyzed, normalized, and tested by our science team. Once that is ready and tested, we release it and the new network will count towards your Score. The Klout Score is also measured on a 90 day time decay so by adding these networks to you are able to benefit from a longer window of data when the score goes live.
What We Don’t Measure
Klout does not measure your offline influence. Your Score does not change if you are rich, famous or advising powerful individuals in an offline setting. When evaluating your own Klout Scores or others, you should see it as a reflection of their ability to drive action online, not as a final word on any offline power or influence they have.
In terms of offline influence, arguably no one is more influential than President Barack Obama. Yet his Klout score is currently only 87, while others, such as tech pundit Robert Scoble, have higher scores than President Obama.
The Klout Score doesn’t mean that Robert Scoble is more influential in the world than Obama. It currently means that Mr. Scoble is using social media more effectively to drive more actions from his networks. In addition to have a very strong Twitter presence, Scoble has taken to Google+, amassing 730k comments and 730k Reshares in the past 90 days. In the same period, Barack Obama only received 530k and 470k Retweets and Mentions. This is one of the great things about social media, a normal person can out engage the President of the United States and build the power to activate an incredibly powerful network.
If President Obama really put his mind to it, we’re sure he could improve his Klout Score, but he probably has other important things to think about. :)
The Future
As the Internet transforms from being page centric to people centric, understanding influence is going to be one of the most important and challenging problems of our generation. It’s very early in this process and we have a ton of work ahead of us but we couldn’t be more excited to take on this challenge. The Klout Score will continuously evolve to more accurately measure your influence, wherever it lies. Our pledge to you is to give you honest, real information about what we are (and are not) measuring when we create Klout Scores. We’d love to hear your thoughts on influence and the Klout Score.
