My take on Klout: It is a number that is given between 1-100 measuring your influence across social media networks. Most people have never heard of Klout, great idea, pretty to look at and if you have the time to search out the people with top Klout scores I think it is a great idea, for others I would spend more time actually getting interesting articles to tweet about. Saying that I am going to give Klout a bit of a nudge to see what I can really get out of it. Will keep you posted.
Wikipedia take on what is Klout:
Klout is a San Francisco based company that provides social media analytics that measures a user’s influence across their social network. The analysis is done on data collected from sites such as Twitter and Facebook and measures the size of a person’s network, the content created, and how other people interact with that content.[2] Klout recently added LinkedIn, Foursquare, and YouTube data to its algorithm.[3]
Klout Score
The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses many, many variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.
True Reach is the size of one’s engaged audience and is based on those of their followers and friends who actively listen and react to messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that one’s messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential one’s engaged audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.
The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people.
Methodology
Klout measures influence by using data points from Twitter, such as: following count, follower count, retweets, list memberships, how many spam/dead accounts are following you, how influential the people that retweet you are, and unique mentions. This information is blended with Facebook data such as comment, likes, and the number of friends in your network to come up with a “Klout Score” that measures a user’s online influence.[4]
From the Klout Website:
The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare in order to measure:
How many people you influence (True Reach)
How much you influence them (Amplification)
How influential they are (Network Score)