How Much Klout Do You Have?

By Renee Mitson

Social influence may be the next way you’re judged. Do you get a free pass to a movie? A dinner reservation? Red Sox tickets? Or do you get a whole lot of nothing? Klout, and other similar products, tell you just how much you deserve, based on how much influence you have.

Klout is a social media analytics tool that puts a fresh spin on engagement measurement. Similar toTweetReach, Klout lets you know how well you are engaging with people, but instead of impressions, you receive a Klout score. This score dictates how influential your outgoing content is within your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn account. This score is then given a label, such as “Dabbler,” “Networker,” or “Socializer,” depending on your score. The label has a short description that lets the viewer know what his or her score really means.

For instance, my Klout score is a 52, and my label is a “Specialist.” This means that although I have a fairly influential score, my influential topics are specialized. This makes sense as I am usually tweeting about social media, design, or the Bruins. What may surprise you is that although someone may have more followers than you, he or she may have a lower Klout score. This is how all of those idiots who bought Twitter followers are going to get into trouble. Once again, it is better to have ten highly engaged followers than 1,000 followers who do not really care what you have to say.

Within an office, it is easy to get competitive with Klout scores. Klout is also a great way to compare yourself to people you aspire to be — what are they influential about? Again, do not underestimate your Facebook account in its ability to affect your score. I recently compared myself to someone with more friends and more followers and the other person came up short due to my amount of Facebook comments.

But it is important to remember that Facebook is not necessarily affecting your “brand,” since you are not likely friending clients or potential business contacts. Your Facebook networking ability is more accurately stating your ability to network with people you know, which is certainly helpful but less likely to land you a dream job or a promotion.

Klout is also coming out with some really cool features. For instance when you link to Twitter or Facebook, you can view all of your friends and their scores. Secondly, you can directly compare your achievements side by side to theirs when you are logged in, with information like total retweets, unique mentions, comments, and “likes.” On your own profile you can also view who you directly influence, or as I like to call it, your groupies.

The Klout Style section goes deeper in depth regarding your title with an easy-to-read chart showing you how much you are sharing vs. participating, or how broad vs. consistent you are. Are you just reaching out to a small sector of people, or do you social network through a span of topics? This is the kind of news that businesses would pay big bucks to social media marketers in years passed.

And Klout continues to add new dimensions. There is a new section popping up on Klout profiles and that is the “Achievements.” This section was on Klout previous to May 2011, but since then Klout has moved to a new achievements measurement system that should be returning to profiles everywhere soon. However, old achievement badges, which are reminiscent of Foursquare badges, are grandfathered in and can still be visible on older profiles.

So… curious to know your score? Is you inner competitive nature stretching its wings? Let the online popularity contest begin!

What do you think? Do you have Klout?

This post was originally on The Next Great Generation Site, where Renee is a tech/social media writer.