Recently I’ve been secretly checking my Klout Score day and night.
In fact, several of the social media profiles I manage have been gaining increasing Klout Scores every single day for weeks now!
With all this success, I’ve become obsessed – addicted – to checking my Klout Score!
Then, the unthinkable happened! To my shock and dismay, I brought up my profile on Klout this evening – only to find out that my growing Klout Score has dropped back for the first time in the past few weeks!
I had full anticipation that I would be measuring the growth and development of my overall Klout score and I had also expected to gain further gratification in my self-absorbed monitoring of my ‘true reach’… but, instead, I saw this chart;
What Is A ‘Klout Score’?
It may sound like a phrase that Fraternity Brothers might use in College, but it’s actually a great way to take a bird’s-eye view of your effectiveness online.
Why You Want A Healthy Klout Score
Your Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action.
Klout Measures Influence. Influence, and your ability to drive action within your Niche is the cornerstone that separates the successful businesses, therefore learning about how Klout works can help you become a more effective communicator, and this will improve your business!
Every time you create content or engage with content online, you influence others.
Klout uses data from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google +, Linkedin, Flickr, YouTube and others in order to create a score that measures your influence based on:
True Reach: When you post a message, what people tend to respond or share it?
Amplification: When you post a message, how many people respond to it or spread it further?
Network Impact: How often do top Influencers share and respond to your content?
How To Increase Your Klout Score
I consider myself very fortunate to be in a position where I can experiment with several specific content strategies and engagement strategies with many business and personal projects across multiple channels – and see how different strategies effect results.
A New Mini-Mission: After completing many marketing campaigns, monitoring results, reporting to clients – and comparing these various activities to the changes in Klout Scores over time, I’ve started on a journey to learn everything I can about what affects your Klout Score, and to create a repeatable process, a guide, that anyone can follow.
Starter Articles on Increasing Your Klout Score
I’ve read some nice general outlines that offered basic tips for increasing your Klout Score – almost all of them provide a similar top recommendation: telling you that you should provide fantastic content for your niche.
They say ‘Create Content Worth Sharing‘ -
This is fantastic advice. I liked much of what I read, I nodded my head, yes, yes, yes…
but many of the recommendations were very generic: too general to use in creating a plan of action. There were no specific examples; no case studies that I might use as a Guide To Increasing My Klout Score.
I had to read on.
Many of the articles I read about increasing my Klout Score were focused on using information tools to help with building new connections with people online – with people I have only met through cyberspace.
I agree it is important to be business-ready for inbound marketing, to establish my profiles and manage the citations about my business – but having a great presence with thousands of followers is a different thing than getting a response from your following, or even having your content show up in their time-line.
It feels to me that actively cultivating blind connections with new people through social media is like putting the cart before the horse.
I didn’t find any useful information that pointed out strategies for cutting through the enormous online clutter, and focused on my personal network of contacts.
Finally Getting Some Answers
Understanding The Score That Klout Gives You
Your score is a collection of about 20 different variables as Klout analyzes the content you have created across the 12 networks it calculates. The most important aspect of your score is a measure of your ability to drive action. This is influence.
Another key concept in your score is time. Klout believes that influence fades over time and you must constantly produce content that drives action, in order to remain influential on a topic. I’m not sure I fully agree with this assumption but, time is a strong part of how the score is calculated and important to know about as you reflect on the relative importance of your Klout Score against your total marketing plans.
How Your Message Can Improve Your Klout Score
Learn From The Best Examples Of Influencers
It’s always good to study what the leaders are doing, and come up with a creative way to provide something of similar value for your audience.
Communication is a skill that can be learned, and Klout provides a fantastic way to easily find top content influencers so you can learn from them and gain insights into their success.
In addition to reviewing the Total Klout Score of a leader, you can also sort Klout users who have received the most +Ks for respective topics. This is fantastic feedback that can help you review and focus the wording of your marketing message to better match the audience you are trying to reach.
(aside: When you give or receive a K+, it doesn’t affect the Klout influence score, it only affects the topics you’re influential about.)
Who Is Your Message For?
The same care should go into planning your audience as you put into planning your message. A great message to the wrong audience goes by unheard, or worse, causes irritation.
Get Past The First Information Filter
We are truly bombarded with communication and incoming information these days. Much of it is filtered, skimmed, set aside for ‘later’… With so much information, we instinctually use this primary information filter:
Do I Know You?
Before we even read an incoming message! This means you should tap in to your current real world network. Wondering what to review when studying how to increase your Klout Score? Start with your list of real world contacts.
Learn, use and practice the person-to-person networking skills then simply connect with these people on all the online services – and in truth, if you follow just a few of the *McKay’s Maxim’s* – your network will grow, you’ll have more fun than ever, and your Klout Score will take care of itself!
The Secret To Increasing Your Klout?
It’s all about people. It’s all about communication.
The more we are overloaded with information, the more important basic communication becomes.
Back-To-The-Basics Networking, Harvey McKay’s book:
‘Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty
Who Are You Currently Interacting With?
Are you certain you are connected to the people you know who are also using these main social channels?
In my experience, my Score recently started to increase once I removed my focus from trying to gain the attention of people I have never met – and instead, started to communicate exclusively with people I have a real-world connection with – then my Klout score started increasing at a steady rate.
Why Is My Klout Increasing?
Simple – I know these people and they know me. Our personal connection cuts through the mass of marketing messages, and we respond to one another.
The paradox is: we are not marketing to each other – instead, we are talking about our passions, we are working together, we are playing together – and we are extending those relationships by planning, following-up and having real-time conversations about our real world interactions, using online media. Klout uses interactions on these public networks as a measure your influence.
Therefore, by definition, Klout score is a thin representation of the actual interactions occurring between people, and at best, only casts a shadow of a representation of your actual, real-world influence.
Increasing your Klout Score should get as much attention as changing the oil in your car – you want to keep a casual eye on it because it is a general indicator of your marketing success online, but we all know it would be foolish to stare at the oil gauge in the car while driving! You must keep your eyes on the road and focus on driving to your next destination!
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Shortly after I posted this, Klout made a radical change to the way they calculate your score. Klout scores dropped for many and reaction in the Social Media world was swift and angry.
A short time later as people are experimenting with their online activities and testing the results to their scores, the changes are being touted as ‘The famous Klout Fail of 2011′.
Here is one such Klout Score experiment with rather disturbing results:
http://bundlepost.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/my-klout-experiment-and-the-disturbing-results
And just that fast, my trust in Klout measurements evaporated and my addiction to checking my Klout Score has been cured.
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