There are pros and cons to claims by the start-up analytics firm
By: Dan Yurman djysrv@gmail.com
This is a text version of the presentation given at the January 2012 CDPUG monthly meeting.
What is Klout. It is an online measurement tool of Twitter influence. It measures impact and influence. The more engagement it measures with your tweets, the more influence you have. It uses a numerical score but numbers aren’t everything. The average score for twitter users is about 20, but anything over 50 is good.
Examples of Klout Scores
| Dunkin Donuts – 65 | Starbucks – 79 |
| Food | Brand |
| Coffee | Coffee |
| Brand | Food |
How Klout measures influence
· True reach – the number of people who act on or share your content
· Amplification – a measure of how likely people are to act on or share your content
· Network – a measure of how many top influencers in your industry are in your network
How to get more Klout
The most important thing is to stick with a topic you know well. It is important to create meaningful content that people reading your tweets will value. This includes responding to inquiries and engaging with others authentically even when you are wrong. Avoid at all costs games or tricks that will make your tweets look like spam.
Publish frequently. A good rule of thumb is at least a few tweets a day Monday through Thursday. As a practical matter, Internet readership declines sharply on Fridays and falls off a cliff on Saturdays. In any case, be persistent as it takes time to build a brand.
Benefits of a high Klout score
It will drive traffic to your main web site,, blog, or online store. It will increase brand awareness and the number of people who become prospects that lead to sales. It supports differentiation from the competition in terms of quality, price, service, and value.
Where does Klout work best?
Klout scores are most useful to brands that have huge consumer markets. At the top of the list are entertainment firms including movies, television, the arts, and mass media. Sports come in second with the major leagues being intensely interesting in stadium attendance and television audiences including the folks in your favorite sports bar. Fantasy sports leagues are huge users of twitter and drive a lot of traffic to major league sites: MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL.
Consumer end use food and beverage products are very interested in influencers of public tastes. Other hot areas is home consumer electronics. Personal care products and over-the-counter medications get attention. Major retailers interested in fashion trends follow twitter conversations with intense interest. Rounding it out the other top areas are stocks, investments, and politics.
Where does Klout not work well?
Industries which are low tech in terms of social media are not amenable to using Klout scores. Industrial manufacturing and business services are examples. Others include extractive industries such as coal, oil and natural gas. Agriculture and food production fall in this category along with pollution control and waste management.
Is Klout everything it promises to be?
The short answer is maybe not. There are unresolved privacy issues. Last November the New York Times reported that Klout had produced profiles of minors without parental consent. The company claims it has no interest in developing this kind of information, but its aggressive methods of aggregating online profiles got it into hot water just the same.
Critics have complained that not all social networks are measured consistently or even at all and that a new algorithm has created new controversies for the firm. There are complaints the firm hasn’t fully explained how it does measurement.
For anyone contemplating getting a Klout score, which is free, it is important to remember that the benefits of the score accrue to the firm. Your score is their product which they sell to advertisers, major brands, and other marketing organizations. You are not their client.
A Klout score is not the same as a Google page rank. For SEO practitioners and advertising agencies, there could be some challenging dialogs with customers if clients become confused and possibly unhappy if they don’t like their score.
What’s next?
Klout like other start-ups wants to get an IPO out the door to raise cash to grow. To do that they will have to convince investors they are the next big thing in Internet analytics. That’s a question because the major online search engines like Google and Bing do not index Twitter tweets. Facebook and Google are in a race to capture the world of social media, but Google is likely to continue to dominate in search.
Regardless of where engagement is measured, no single number like a Klout score is going to define success.
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Posted by: blog@cdpug.org
