What Is My Klout Score, and Why Should I Even Care?

Tom McNaughton

The more I hear people talk about their Klout score, the more I realize that there is a huge number of people that really don’t understand what Klout is and what it can do to help you. I don’t know if you have been watching any discussions when the subject comes up, but it seems as though a lot of people are afraid of the plain hard truth of what Klout says about their social presence online.

What Is Klout?

Maybe you’ve heard of Klout score, and maybe not. However, if you’re into social media, or want to become a highly influential person in social media, then Klout may be something you don’t want to sweep under the rug.

Klout was a company started in San Francisco in 2009 and it determines your “Klout score”, which measures how influential you are across social media networks. Even if you’ve never heard of Klout before, it doesn’t mean that they haven’t heard of you. If you have a Twitter account, then you have a Klout score.

Do you understand the importance of Klout score? There is a story that Wired brings up about a man that was asked in an interview if he knew what Klout was. He confessed that he had no idea what a Klout score was. He subsequently learned that his Klout score was 34–not too bad–but the guy who got the job had a Klout score of 67.

Klout basically assigns someone a score between 1 and 100, 1 being that you’re really don’t know what you’re talking about, and 100 meaning that you’re George Tekei. The average score on Klout is 20, and anything higher means that you’re moderately influential in what you’re talking about on social media. My Klout score has went up as high as 70 before, but it seems as though they felt I didn’t know as much as I said and have recently dropped it to 61.

Why You Should Care About Your Klout Score

It’s not like you have to stay awake at nights worrying about whether or not your Klout has dropped or not, I am merely stating that it’s something that can help you grade yourself on social interactivity. If you’re wanting to be a real professional in your field, then you need a Klout of over 50 at least. It’s not that hard to get it that high either. Once you start linking your social media accounts to Klout, you start raising your score. That’s the easy part.

You should care about your score because people like Pat Flynn, Marcus Sheridan, and Chris Brogan all have high scores. It’s not because you need to jump on the Klout bandwagon, but because these people are making millions of dollars per year in just speaking engagements. This is something that may not interest you, but it interests me, so I’m talking about it.

There are companies out there, big companies, that personally aren’t surfing Facebook and Twitter like you and I. They have no idea about what you have to do in order to build a following on social media, all they know is where to get the grading system for people like you and me. Klout is where they go. Like the above discussion on Facebook, you WILL get a job based on your Klout score alone. You WILL get graded by people on the outside by just your Klout influence. This is why youshould care about your score.

It’s not only for their benefit, but also yours. This is going to show you how you can be better in each social site. How interaction is the key to building influence on your social media platforms. Not only will your Klout go up, but so will your reader base.

How To Increase Your Klout Score

Here are some unofficial tips on how to increase your score on Klout:

1: Go Public- Like I said before, everyone who has a Twitter account has a score on Klout. In order to start your grading process, you need to log into Klout.com and allow it access to all of your social media accounts. There is a place where you can connect everything that you’re most active on.

By connecting all of the media you’re active on, you can start to raise your Klout score by doing only that!

Klout says that connecting networks can only help your score, and it recognizes how “nearly impossible [it is] for any person to be consistently effective across every network.” That said, you should link only to accounts that you keep up with, according to social media expert Tori Kyes. You should also make your linked accounts public.

2: Build Relationships:

HA! I told you didn’t I? Your true measure of reach is not only the people that follow you on social media, but also the people that you be-friend and interact with on a daily basis. Having 100k Twitter followers doesn’t mean much if they’re not interacting with you on Twitter!

This is really great news for the newbie just starting out because it’s not how many followers that you have, it’s how much those followers engage you on a daily basis is what’s important!

To improve your “True Reach”, you need to establish and build relationships with other people online. And don’t worry about talking to people with a lower Klout score than you. Klout says it will not punish or take away points if you do.

3: Pay Special Attention To Influencers:

It’s definitely worth identifying the “power influencer’s” in your niche and interacting with them occasionally. Don’t be a “suck-up” or be known as blatantly climbing the social ladder, but interact with them on a personal level, one where they would have to interact with you. Ask them questions, keep them engaged and your score will rise.

Rachel Hutman from Clearpoint Agency says: “Don’t just retweet them; that means nothing. Respond to what they are saying. Ask them additional questions. Be enlightening, funny to get their attention. The more followers someone has, if they then talk about you, your Klout score will undoubtedly go up.”

4: Ask Questions:

I know this is kind of repetitive, but when you pinpoint someone that is considered an authority figure online and you ask them a question, then they are likely to mention you, which, in turn, will lead to interaction. The more questions you can think to ask these people the more answers you’ll get. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t love to give their opinion on a subject. This is a great strategy to raise your Klout score online. One question that has especially helped me get the most interaction out of people is by asking them about their story. People just love to talk about themselves, and I’m no different! If you asked me to share my story, I would bite, that’s for sure!

5: Make Your Content Easy To Share:

By using such strategies as tagging and including the RT(retweet) and hashtags in certain social updates you will reach more people when you share your content. I don’t recommend tagging the same person every time though. If you do this, pretty soon, you’re just going to make yourself known as aggravating to the public and they will eventually ignore you.

Use trends to figure out what people are searching for and sharing. This can be done both on Twitter and Google Plus. There is always a popular trend to follow on these sites. Also, one or two times a day, I usually tag someone as well. Using a tag like +YourFriend on Google Plus will prompt that user to share your post. Also using RT @YourFriendsUsername on Twitter will also prompt them to retweet that update.

6: Post At The Right Time:

This is one of the most important things you can do to improve your Klout score and not to mention your social media strategy. I love that saying, “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” If you tweet at 4 in the morning, will people see it? Probably not.

You really have to know when is the best time to tweet, this is going to go a long way to determine your social status and how many people are actually seeing what you are posting.

Over To you

Do you have a strong Klout score? Are you working on getting it higher, or do you even care? What are some of the best strategies that you have implemented in getting more interaction on your social media profiles? I would love to hear about them!