The Official Klout Blog

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Today we’re releasing a new scoring model with insights to help you understand changes in your influence. This project represents the biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology in Klout’s history. Joe shared the full vision behind these changes in his post last week.

Influence is the ability to drive action and is based on quality, not quantity. When someone engages with your content, we assess that action in the context of the person’s own activity. These principles form the basis of our PeopleRank algorithm which determines your Score based on:

• how many people you influence,
• how much you influence them and
• how influential they are.

We analyze 2.7 billion pieces of content and connections daily. Reaching this scale, we’ve introduced significant upgrades to our platform, allowing us to handle this explosive growth. Now, we can add more networks and other sources of your influence much, much faster.

Insights help you understand why your Score changed. Each day, you can see which subscore and people in your network caused that change. You can also view insights on your friends’ profiles.

These changes are a significant milestone in the Klout Score’s evolution and you can continue to expect more improvements in the future. As always, your opinion is very important to us and we’d love to hear your feedback.

How will this affect my Score?

A majority of users will see their Scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop. In fact, some of our Scores here at the Klout HQ will drop — our goal is accuracy above all else. We believe our users will be pleased with the improvements we’ve made. Below is a distribution of the Score changes. You’ll note large decreases in Score are rare.

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More than three years ago the Klout Score was born in my bedroom in New York City as a way to make sense of the noise I was seeing in social media. I could share my opinion about anything, instantly, with the people who trust me and the data was available to measure my impact. Fast forward to today and we now have over 3,500 companies using the Klout Score to reward influencers with Klout Perks, give better customer service, reward loyalty, recruit, and much more.

The biggest change in the past three years is that (thankfully) we have people way smarter than me spending each and every day improving the algorithms that calculate the Klout Score. I am incredibly proud of the work the team has done and I am excited to announce the biggest improvement to the Klout Score in our history is launching next week.

People Rank
We’ve often thought of what we’re doing as a form of PeopleRank and this is a giant step in that direction. We’ve improved the stability and accuracy of our scores. Furthermore, our subscores have always been an important part of Klout. This update will make them more clear and make changes easier to understand.

True Reach
True Reach is the number of people you influence. It is a real number of people we find by looking at the impact you have on your connections. We analyze over two and a half billion connections and pieces of content every day in order to accurately gauge who is in your true reach.

Amplification
Amplification is how much you influence these people. We analyze how many people in your potential audience act upon your content. We take this a step further and understand what an influence signal means in the context of that person. For instance, if I rarely like or comment on anyone’s posts, but choose to do so to yours, that is more meaningful than if I like 60 posts a day. Amplification indicates the effect you have on your audience.

Network Impact
Network Impact is the influence of your audience. This is on a 1 to 100 scale and indicates the influence level of people who engage with your content. It’s not just about how many people you reach, it’s about getting your message to the right people. Having more connections won’t help your Network Impact, but having influential connections will.

Accuracy & Transparency
The subscores contribute to one overall score, the Klout Score. We’ve always been transparent about the various activities that could impact your Klout Score but we now have the power to share the specific actions that are helping or hurting your score. When your Klout Score changes you will be able to match it to a corresponding change in one of these subscores and understand why the change has occurred. If your Score goes up because more top influencers are acting upon your content, we will share that with you.

Influence is the Ability to Drive Action
The core premise behind our algorithms has always been that influence is the ability to drive action. We have tightened this concept even further in this release. You are not more influential because you tweet or use Facebook more, you are influential because you have an influential audience engaging with your content.

The Standard for Influence
With thousands of companies and millions of people leveraging the Klout Score, we take our role as the standard for measuring influence incredibly seriously. We are very early in what we view as a long journey. The team here at Klout is thrilled about the challenge ahead of us and are completely dedicated to creating the most accurate measurement of influence in the world. To that end, you can expect the way we measure influence to continue to evolve as behaviors change on the social web or as new networks like Google+ emerge. The majority of the time these changes will be incremental and invisible to most people, but this world changes fast and occasionally you can expect us to make significant changes like the one we are launching next week.

And of course, I know you want to know…

How will this affect my Score?
A majority of users will see their Scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop. Some of our Scores here at the Klout HQ will drop (including mine) — our goal is accuracy above all else. We believe our users will be pleased with the improvements we’ve made.

This is a project that’s been under development for over three months, and, in many ways, over the three years since Klout started. We appreciate your trust and support and we can’t wait to hear what you think. We will let you know when this new model goes live next week and will continue to work to provide the deepest and most accurate insights into your influence possible.