How Do You Get A Klout Score of 60 and Why Do You Care?

Short Answer: Stop worrying about your Klout score and start creating value for people online.

Klout Overview:

If you aren't familiar with Klout, this website set out to measure the online influence of people. They give every online user a score between 1 and 100 and connect marketers and brands with users that are influential in the topics most important to the brand. Since their launch there have been some competitors that have come into the space as well. You can setup your account at Klout.com and connect your profiles from your various social networks.

According to Klout the average score is about 20. A score of 50 would put you in the top 5% of users and a score of 63 would put you in the top 1%. Klout also identifies and allows users to identify for themselves topics around which they are or mean to be influential.

How Does the Klout Score Work?

Naturally Klout isn't going to share their full algorithm for how they calculate scores. There are some things that we know both because Klout has shared the information and through testing.

Connecting different social networks will only help you. Engagement from different social networks adds to your Klout score incrementally. If you have low influence on one network adding it will still only help your overall score.

Things you would assume effect engagement do effect the Klout score. Comments, like, favorites, shares, and retweets for example all increase and drive your Klout score.

Why Might You Care?

Your Klout score can certainly help stroke your ego I suppose. Some people also setup their account so that they can receive Klout perks. Perks are the “gifts” given to users from brands based on their influence in a specific topic.

I think most importantly you should think of Klout as a way of measuring if you are doing it right. Are you, or is your team, really engaging your network and audience correctly. Do people care about your brand and open themselves to engage with it? Klout is a way of measuring that. It isn't perfect but I think its the best tool we have.

Example: I have a friend who has less than 1000 Twitter follower and he has a Klout score of 63. I have over 20,000 followers and my Klout score is 60. So which is more valuable, engagement or size of audience? ENGAGEMENT is more valuable and that is why the Klout score removes the smoke screens and allows us to see what really matters.

So Your Focus Should Be On:

Identify what you want to be known for.

Create and push out value for people around those topics.

Focus on people. Engage them and care about their content as well.