According to Klout.com, a Klout score is the measurement of your overall online influence.
Klout scores can range from 1 to 100, with 100 being the highest.
Klout uses activity on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to determine a person’s score based on several factors in 3 categories, which are: True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network influence.
What is True Reach
True Reach is described as the size of your engaged audience. A person might have 1,000 followers on Twitter and be connected with 100s of people on Facebook and LinkedIn, but that doesn’t matter if the audience isn’t responding. True reach looks at 2 areas to determine if your audience is engaged and active with you.
First, is reach – Are you interesting and informative to your audience and is your content shared across the Internet?
Second, is demand – Do people follow you back and how many people did you have to follow to get the followers that you have?
Here you can see that there are 1,060 followers but the engaged audience is 438.
What is Amplification Probability
Amplification Probability is described as the likelihood that your content will be acted upon. You send out 200 tweets a day and 50 updates on Facebook, but are people taking action on these things? Amplification Probability looks at 3 areas to determine if people are taking action on your messages.
First, is engagement – Do you participate in conversations and do you reach a wide range of people?
Second, is velocity - How often are you retweeted and who retweets you (is it always the same few people or is it many different people)?
Third, is activity – How often do you tweet (too much or too little for your audience) and are people replying, retweeting, and/or following you from your tweets?
The chart below shows you that the Amplification Probability is 42 and the number of times that messages have been retweeted (Twitter), liked (FB), and had comments (FB).
What is Network Influence
Network Influence is described as the influence level of your engaged audience. This part looks at the Klout of the people following and talking to you. The higher the Klout score of your followers and the people that are engaged with you, the higher your Network Influence score will be.
Are the people that retweet, reply, follow, and list you influential?
Here it shows you that the Network Influence score is 68 and the number of unique people that have engaged in some way.
Klout looks at many different factors when calculating their social media influence scores but what it really boils down to is action. To have strong social media clout means that not only are you talking, but that people are responding to that “talk” in some way.
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*This is the first in a multi-post series explaining the ins and outs of this popular social media reach calculation tool and how it relates to bloggers and small business owners.
Jessica Torres is the wanna-be entertaining writer of the blog My Time As Mom. She is the official caretaker of 1 husband, 2 adorably insane girls, and 2 dumb dogs which causes her to be operating under the influence of sleep deprivation on most days. Since joining the blogosphere in January of 2011 she has been hard at work learning all there is to know about social media and sharing her knowledge with anyone that will listen. You can follow her on Twitter and also check out her project VlogTalk (@VlogTalkMeme) where she has partnered with Elena (Mommy is in Timeout) to encourage bloggers to step in front of the camera every week.
Awesome post on Klout and I can’t wait for the rest of the series. Right now – I’ll admit it – I’m addicted. I’m very upset that as of this morning Jessica, you are no longer an influencer over me. Maybe you need to start a Nayna advice column on twitter.
I do like how they break your social media score down – I think it’s important to not just look at followers, but to see where and who you are influencing. It will be interesting to see where Klout goes.
Klout seems to be adding a lot of new features so it will very interesting to see how they grow.
Thanks for breaking it down, Jessica! I know we all joke about our Klout scores, but we actually really do care!!
It’s good to know your overall score and your topics but it’s also important to understand how it’s calculated so that you can increase it.
I don’t think I’ve dived in to Klout as much as I could because I only ever see, or pay attention to, the one main score. Which is pathetically low (not that I care or anything… um, yeah).
I hope your will continue to follow the series on Klout and it helps you to understand how it works and what to do to increase your score.
Thanks for the info. I was wondering all those things were for. Now if only having a high klout score can get me more money….
It is very complex how they calculate the total score but each individual measure is important.
Love that this is all here in one place. It’s hard to explain to people in 140 characters or less when they ask me on twitter. MUCH easier to tell them to come read this!
Somethings are better explained in blog posts instead of on Twitter.
Thank you for the explanation.
You are welcome. Hope it helped you understand Klout better.
Thanks for breaking it down for us! I know we’ve joked about it on twitter, but I really do want to learn what it’s for and how it works.
I hope you will come back the next couple weeks and read the rest of the series.
I so need to get on the Klout bandwagon, I can’t wait to read more!!
Thanks Jessica!!
You should definitely register with Klout at the minimum.
Great write-up! I now understand Klout – thank you!
You are welcome. Glad it was helpful for you.
Great post on Klout. I’ve never of heard of Klout before! I think I would like to get some more of it!
You should at least register for Klout if nothing else.
Thanks for this. My klout level is tragic but I’m not suprised since I’m just learning about this now.
Working hard at trying to increase it
Just keep engaging and your score will increase.
Hm, why does the word ‘Klout’ make me want to hit someone? I am influential on Tim Hortons. I think my life is complete now.
Great article Jessica
I think you just need to understand it more.
Klout seems to mean something between us bloggers, but I wonder if it means anything to those looking for someone to pitch their product?
Next week we will be talking about why Klout is important, but yes it does matter for brands and PR companies.
Great post Jessica! Love when someone explains the “in thing” at the time so I don’t look silly trying to understand it!!
Smarty pants!
Thank you so very much for your clear Klout highlight! I am so new at all of this and I am really looking forward to the rest of your posts. Guess I will head over to register!
I’m not sure if I missed this, but I just signed up for Klout and I can’t figure out how to give someone Klout (and what kinds of things I should give it to them for).
You need to visit their Klout pages, and then check to see the topics they are considered influential in. You can only give a +K to a topic listed.
[...] we’ve previously discussed, Klout is the number that shows how influential you are in the social media realm, and is calculated with [...]
[...] your personal Klout page, you can see graphs of your Network Influence, Amplification Probability and True Reach. If you’d like to have an idea of how you stack up against someone else, visit their Klout [...]
I’m a newbie and this is a great intro! Now I can finally say I know what a klout score is… Just a little scared to check my score! Is your score visible to everyone?