Is Klout An Accurate Measure Of Your Social Influence?

Klout is a service that claims to measure social media influence, but is it accurate? That’s the million-dollar question among social media marketers. The service has its proponents, but it also has its detractors.

For starters, the definition of influence is a little bit murky. For instance, does it mean you get a lot of Likes on Facebook or a lot of Re-Tweets on Twitter? Klout tries to measure both, but it doesn’t end there. Klout tries to measure several social services including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, and that’s just for starters. They also measure the number of connections you have on each service, their influence, and how big the networks of those connections are in order to determine your true reach.

Klout is by no means a perfect service. They have a long way to go in order to be able to measure true social influence, and they are further along the path than just about anybody else online.

A better question is, should you rely on it for accurately measuring your influence and make business decisions based on your Klout score?

This is where we start to get into questionable territory. “I think that making important social media decisions that affect your business based on a single Klout score would be a big mistake,” says social media strategist Caroline Melberg.   “But I also think it would be an error to completely ignore Klout. I recommend you join the service and check on it from time to time, but don’t take everything you see on Klout as gospel regarding your social authority,” she adds.

Published on: November 28, 2012