KLOUT – Know Your Social Influence

The Klout Score is a number between 1-100 that represents your influence on and offline. The more influential you are, the higher your Klout Score. Klout scores can change on a daily basis. The site tracks these changes and charts them, letting you know when your strategies have and have not been effective.

What Does Klout Measure?
To use Klout, you have to give the site access to one or more of your social media accounts: Twitter and Facebook are the staples, and LinkedIn is supported, too. Klout actually gives you four scores altogether: an overall Klout score, True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network scores.

Klout reportedly looks at 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure the scores. The overall Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments, and retweets, according to the site. True Reach considers the size of your “engaged audience,” looking for instances of followers and friends who actively “listen and react to” your posts. True reach is a raw number and the only score not based on a 1-to-100 scale. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will be retweeted, receive an @ reply in Twitter, or receive a “like” or comment on Facebook. The Network score looks at your engaged audience (the same people from True Reach) and then considers how influential they are.

Klout never says exactly what it measures or how it weights and punches all these numbers. It specifically calls out Facebook and Twitter, but leaves out LinkedIn. It talks about clicks, comments, and retweets, but doesn’t even hint at whether any of these is seen as more valuable than another. And is there a difference, score-wise, between a frequent commenter’s replies (perhaps a very nosey and vocal close connection) versus having many different people reply to your posts? Klout never says.