How Klout Scores Work
Hootsuite released new social CRM tools this morning that allow you to filter your keyword and search columns for Twitter by keywords – and even more importantly by influencer. Recently Hootsuite also integrated Klout Scores, a score that measures your influence across the web, into their dashboard metrics. So now, for instance, if you manage a Twitter account for an ice cream brand you can do a search across Twitter for people talking about ice cream and sort these people by their Klout score or influence. This is extremely helpful because community managers no longer have to spend half their time searching for influencers – now audiences can easily be sorted by Klout score and more time can be spent reaching out to people most likely to help you spread your message.
Determining who your brand’s influencers are in the social space has become an increasingly difficult task. The company Klout has come up with one of the most popular ways to measure the influence of users on Twitter with what they call the Klout score. They have a great post to help you better understand the Klout Score, but basically they explain:
The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 0 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 25 variables to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Score. The size of the sphere is calculated by measuring True Reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Amplification Probability is the likelihood that messages will generate retweets or spark a conversation. If the user’s engaged followers are highly influential, they’ll have a high Network Score. We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link.
So How Does Your Klout Score Stack Up? The majority of Twitter users have relatively low Klout scores (0-20.) I tweet everyday and share information with my 1,500 followers on a regular basis and only have a Klout score of 32. So I thought it would be interesting to see where the big Twitter celebrities ranked:
I thought it was interesting that Lebron James had such a high score (85) seeing as he created his account a week ago, has only 11 updates and is only following one person. Justin Bieber is dominating with a perfect Klout score of 100. Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian are not too far behind him although they have always been major players on Twitter.
What do you think of the Klout Score formula? Do you think it is a good judge of influence or do you use another process to determine who will best share you information?
In: Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: Hootsuite, Klout
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@KathleneHestir (11)
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on July 14, 2010 at 6:44 pm
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Helpful article, thanks. I've switched over to bartering recently for most of anything I can get without having to shell out cash. There are a couple sites out thereto use, to connect with people who are looking to barter trade/swap items or even services (carpentry work for auto work, etc). One of the sites I use is Baarter – http://baarter.com
on July 17, 2010 at 12:23 am
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[...] Klout Scores Work | Engauge Blog & @KathleneHestir » How Klout Scores Work Hootsuite released new social CRM tools yesterday that allow you to filter your keyword and search [...]
on July 16, 2010 at 11:44 pm
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Kathlene
I think those influencer score are ok but lack one very important factor when considering influence: Context – You can't be an influencer on evreything. An influencer in computer security will likely not be an influencer in fashion (well, I should say low probability). So a flat influence score is very meaningless in my view.
Laurent
on July 19, 2010 at 3:44 pm
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[...] how Hootsuite had recently integrated Klout scores into their dashboard, and went on to explain how Klout scores work. I got an interesting comment from Laurent Pfertzel saying: I think those influencer scores are [...]
on July 19, 2010 at 2:11 pm
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Exactly, except I think Hootsuite has fixed this problem by the way they have integrated it into their dashboard. Now you can search for people on Twitter talking about your brand/product (providing the context we need) – the people interacting with and using it – and sort this group by influence.
For instance, you can search for people talking about computer security – then sort them by influence. This only takes a minute to do on Hootsuite (as opposed to the hours it used to take) and now you have a list of everyone talking about computer security in order of influence.
on July 19, 2010 at 3:52 pm
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p.s. You inspired my next post:) How to Find Your Brand’s Influencers… http://ow.ly/2dsgR
on August 17, 2010 at 8:36 am
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interesting info!