Social influence: About my klout and Klout's klout

Klout is a service that provides insight into your social reach and influence. It hooks up to your twitter and Google+ accounts (among others) and uses information like who and how many people are following you to put a number on your "influence".

Now, the phrase "influence" is really subjective here. If you look at my previous article that provides sales figures for the world's best selling business books for the week starting 22nd of January, 2012, you'll see that despite racking up huge amounts of sales, the authors of said books had little to no social reach or influence at all.

That's not to say they aren't influential. In fact, just the opposite is true. One author, David Novak, is the CEO of a fortune 500 company (Yum! brands) and another, Daniel Kahneman, is a Nobel laureate. These authors have serious clout... just not much Klout.

So even though it cannot really take the context of your social network into account, it can still indicate, on aggregate, how well you are doing in terms of building up an online presence (that you hopefully intend to leverage to generate revenue in some way or another).

For example, I might be a world leading expert on Bonsai, with fanatical fans all over the world - the world's foremost expert - but my Klout score might be far lower than a middle of the range social media expert. In other words, the size of your market, and your overall share of it, is not really taken into consideration.

Despite that, Klout provides an excellent metric for measuring your overall online visibility, authority and reach - collectively "influence". It is not so much your Klout score that counts, as your score relative to direct competitors, or peers, within your niche.

Increasing your klout

Until recently, my primary focus, as a writer and entrepreneur, was on development and eCommerce. More recently, I have started focusing on social media, SEO and Internet marketing, and as a result, I now have some interest in my online visibility, reach and influence in those areas.

From the attached image you can see that my Klout score has increased by 4.5 today, and in fact it has been increasing by between 2 and 5 every day for the last few weeks as I have begun to make serious efforts to build influence. That's cool; at least it's going in the right direction.

Klout also allows you to see who you influence (i.e. who's following you). I note that there are some far more established and well known social, business and marketing influencers following me (call them early adopters ;):

• John Jantsch: Klout score 66
• Eric Ries: Klout score 66
• Anita Campbell: Klout score 64

That's also important information because the quality of your followers must profoundly affect your reach and influence. I would prefer to have three followers on Twitter of the quality of the above mentioned influencers than 3000 spammy, broken, bot, or otherwise accounts. Cool, so that's also going well.

Klout also provides plenty of other nice stats and information that you can use to help determine the success or fairly of your social and marketing efforts. But that's not really where the real value in using Klout lies.

Why is Klout really important?

The real value of Klout lies in whether or not it becomes the de facto standard for measuring reach and influence. If it becomes widely accepted in traditional business, and in particular in marketing and advertising, then the value of your Klout score can be used to determine the value (and therefore revenue) of the content you produce.

If an advertiser knows that you can influence 10 000 people, they are far more likely to approach you with a view to getting coverage in your blog or website than someone who's reach is closer to 100 people.

By consistently measuring and improving your Klout, you may be setting yourself up to have revenue come to you, rather than having to seek it out. But how likely is that scenario?

Is Klout a popular social influence metric?

I thought I would check out how popular Klout is becoming. For completeness sake, I didn't use Klout's own metric to view their influence, I went to Alexa to see how popular the site is within the context of the Internet as a whole. The following graph shows Klout.com's growth over the last year or so:

Klout's Alexa ranking showing massive growth over the past year

As you can see, Klout as quickly risen to become one of the top websites in the world. A sure sign that despite the many issues surrounding their metric, it is rapidly becoming adopted as a standard for measuring social influence.

If you haven't already, I recommend creating an account and checking out your Klout score. Fortunately, Klout is able to retrospectively track your influence, so you aren't too late to get a brief history of your social influence so far.

What is your Klout? Feel free to share your score here, and ask any questions about how Klout works in the comments below. Alternatively, follow this conversation on twitter or Google+.