If you’re active in Social Media and interested in measuring your performance using a variety of social applications, then you’ve no doubt looked up your Score. Klout and similar tools attempt to measure and quantify how effective individuals are using all the different social tools. By applying these various interactions across various applications to an algorithm, these scoring tools derive a score that purports to be some kind of measure of influence in the social media world.

Klout being one of the highest profile social scoring tools has marketed itself as, “The Standard of Influence”. With this marketing position, Klout has come under fire over the past couple of years as people start comparing their scores to friends, co-workers, industry peers and celebrities. Little insight has ever been given on how Klout’s algorithm works and why for more than an year Justin Bieber scored a perfect 100 while the President Obama scored significantly lower. Was Bieber truly more influential that the President of the United States? Of course not, but Bieber and his staff (under his moniker) were more active at Tweeting, Facebook updates and other social interactions to which his fans, would retweet, like, share, G+ and more. All of which contributed to his perfect score. As popular as President Obama might be, his fans rarely faint at mere mention of his name, much less reTweet everything he posts.

Two weeks ago in an attempt to address this issues plus the ever changing landscape of social applications (combined create the on-line social networking sphere known as Social Media), Klout once again revamped its algorithm. And just like when Google changes their algorithm, people got bent out of shape and stopped paying attention to the improved results, unless of course they’re the beneficiary of the change.

What changed in Klout this time is a significant increase in measurement points in the the algorithm from a few dozen to several hundred. The result of this change has, for the most part, been stabilized scores. It’s much harder now to get a major change in score over night (up or down). One thing Klout has always done when ever they updated their algorithm is work the number backwards so you can see the overall impact.

Take my score for example.

Prior to the change

After the change

Now the big question… Yes, President Obama now has a higher Klout score than Justin Bebier. The next big questions are, “What did Klout do and and how can I leverage this changes to get a higher Klout score?”

To answer the question about how you can manipulate the score to your advantage I have to counter with, why do you care? The score is ultimately a measure how effectively you personally are using various social applications. If you manipulate the score, the number to you becomes meaningless and you’ll have spent more time doing things to manipulate your Klout score then actually using social media applications for what they were indented for (your benefit).

But to give you an idea of some of the changes that have taken place, here are a few that were revealed to members of the Klout Squad, (an unpaid advisory group that I am a member of), just before the release of the new algorithm:

• A look at the make-up your contacts on LinkedIn including their titles and how many recommendations they have received
• How many +K you’ve received and who gave them (their Klout score)
• Do you have a Wikipedia page, if so how often is it update and what category is it in
• Likes of LinkedIn posts

This goes hand-in-hand with some of the previous key measurement points of:

• Total number of Facebook status update likes and shares
• Total number of Twitter reTweets, and by whom
• Number Foursquare comments that were liked, and by whom
• Number of Foursquare tips left that were liked or completed by others

These are just a few of the most high profile components of the Klout Algorithm. The weight each one gets along with all the other key measurement points is part of the secret algorithm. What is helpful is that Klout is also releasing a new interface which is making many of the above elements more transparent which I’ll cover in a future blog post.

What all this boils down to, is that Klout is evolving its scoring model as the world of social marketing evolves and not remaining static. Just as Google and Bing are constantly tweaking and occasionally releasing major updates to their algorithms. If you care about your Klout score, then treat Klout like a search engine and think long term benefit and not just a short term gain. By simply using the appropriate social tools for your specific needs and using them as effectively as possible, you’ll get the best possible score from Klout and more importantly you get the biggest bang possible using social media.

Jim Hedger

Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.

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