Do you use social media, of course you do. How authoritative are you? What does being authoritative mean? How can you measure it? 
Klout’s tag line – Be Known For What You Love.
The rise of social media has sparked a new and serious consideration for businesses. This development resulted in a slew of analytics platforms that attempt to assist you in your social activities.
Essentially, they position themselves to help you make sense of this quickly growing ecosystem. They help you focus your profile’s niche and to find others in the same space.
Klout is an example of such a platform.
What do you love?
Find Out… About Klout
Like my rhyming headline? Yeah, neither do I. Anyway, Klout is all about building influence.
Additionally, they want to give you a view of your social profiles that’s unavailable elsewhere (maybe).
When the almighty dollar is involved, people start to take things seriously.
It’s quite amazing how over the course of a decade, social media changed from some temporary fad to a crucial business process.
It’s akin to when the head of IBM stated that:
“a computer has no place in the home.”
Need I say more?
Klout’s Stats
Since their inception in 2008, Klout has combed through a lot of data. (stats are outdate – from a couple years ago – yet still impressive)
- 620 Million Scores Provided to Users
- 200 Terabytes of Processed Data
- 200 Thousand Businesses Using Klout
- 1 Million Perks Delivered
- 12 Billion Daily Social Signals
- 48 Billion API calls monthly
You don’t have to understand tech to understand that data is king.
Perks, Social Signals, or APIs
To see that Klout is popular and powerful, keep reading because by the end of the article you will understand why Klout gives you an advantage in the ever growing landscape.
Maybe even better than the person with the highest Klout score. By the way,that person is Justin Beiber(100) yeesh, followed by Rihanna (95), Lady Gaga (94) and Barack Obama (92).
A sad state of affairs indeed.
Not hating on Justin, it’s just that, I can think of many people who are more authoritative, but maybe I’m one of the few.
Your Klout Profile
To set up your Klout profile visit their home page and select your account creation preference –Integration with Twitter, Facebook, or with Email.
The whole point of Klout is to integrate all of your social accounts, so you may as well start with Facebook or Twitter.
Click the button to allow the integration. Then, provide your name and email to finish account creation. Now you account is up and you can see you initial Klout score.
Interesting Note – The average Klout score is 40.
Explore
The explore section is a place of discovery. Find content, topics, influencers and more.
All and Newest
When you create an account, you select various topics. To view a feed of content for a specific topic, click on the arrow next to My Topics and select one.
This site is all about tech and digital marketing, but there are many other related categories, as you can see.
My Topics
Select the Edit button in your topics menu and select additional topics. When I go to add topics I can see my current topics as well as recommended topics.
Recommended Topics
The recommended Expertise topics are sourced from the content that you share. Specifically, content that has a higher level of engagement relative to your overall sharing activities. Here are my recommended expertise topics to add.
The section below Expertise is your recommended interest topics. These recommendations are sourced from the content that you engage with. Here are the ones that I was recommended to add.
The oddities from the two topic groups are:
- The Azores
- Supermarkets
- Catering
- Greensboro
I don’t think I ever shared anything about the Azores or Supermarkets but hey, there is probably a good reason for this. Additionally, I don’t remember engaging with any content about Greensboro or Catering but hey, every app has flaws.
The max number of topics is 30 so pick carefully. View the 30 topics I whittled the recommendations list down to by visiting the Learn Internet Grow Klout Profile.
More About Your Selected Topics
When I clicked on Growth Hacking I saw this surprising message.
To check which categories you are actually doing well in, click on your logo in the top left of the screen.
This takes you to your profile with your topics , then hover your cursor over various topics to see what your expertise percentile rank is.
Here are my results:
- Content Marketing – Top 2.8%
- Social Marketing – Top 3.2%
- Etiquette – Top 5.8%
- Affiliate Marketing – Top 5.9%
- Censorship – Top 6%
- Growth Hacking – Top 8%
My conclusion: I’ll have to play with adding different topics and checking how I rank.
Since the subtitle for my site is Tech Skills, I want to be in a significantly high percentile and I’m not listed at all, so I’ll want to go to the feed for that topic and find some content to share.
Although, being in the top for content marketing and social marketing is a success in my book. Overall, this measurement gives you an idea of how well you are executing your social media.
In essence, it measures how well you stay on topic and how consistent you are in your relevant niches.
View Klout Feed by Topic
When you click on a topic, you’ll see a feed of content related to it. Furthermore, in the top right you will see a line graph showing the trending popularity of the topic.
In other words, the number of people talking about it over the last 30 days. The example above for the App Topic.
Featured Expert
Klout takes the top 100 list of content creators in the last 90 days and spits out a random one. Here is the one I saw today.
Interesting Note: Klout identified 47 thousand experts in the App Topic, right below Featured Expert.
Tip: Convenient social buttons that you can right click on and open in a new tab (context menu tip).
Top Expert
This section is like the featured expert section, but lists 10 experts that have generated the most engaging content for this topic in the last 90 days.
The Content in Explore
Next to each content item in your feed you will see a number of clickable items and informational items.
Like, Dislike, Flag, Link, Date, Last Tweet, Topics, and Sharing
Klout makes it easy to find relevant content to share with your social media networks.
View all, newest, or by topic, then scroll until you see something you want to read/share and click the share button.
Use the thumbs up or down button to tell Klout about your preferences. Using these buttons will increase the customization of your content feed.
Essentially, it tells Klout show me less/more of this type of content.
Good Karma: Flag content that shouldn’t be in anyone’s feed.
This is different than thumbs down because it applies universally. Either it isn’t related to the topic or just inappropriate.
The link to the original and published date are also visible for each piece of content. Other related tags are visible and clickable.
If you click a topic, you’ll be brought to a feed of all related content, with relevant top experts, the number of experts related to the topic, and topic popularity trend line.
It seems that the featured expert section doesn’t always display.
Related Klout Profile
If the piece of content was shared by someone with a Twitter profile you will see their profile logo. If you hover your cursor over the logo, you’ll see an expanded window with more profile details.
There are three links in this window:
- @GrowthHackers – Takes you to their Twitter profile.
- 2 minutes ago – Takes you to the URL for the tweet.
- Lastly the URL takes you to the shared content, as you may have guessed.
Sharing Content from Klout
The last option, but certainly not the least is the all important share button. Go ahead, click it, I dare you, I double dare you, oh you did it already, I guess it’s not such a big deal.
Preview
When you click the share button, the first thing you see is the preview for how your post will look.
The upper section shows the Tweet Preview while the bottom shows the Facebook preview.
Click Upload Photo to change the photo, in this above example’s case, I’d find a new one, since it’s so blurry.
The tweet message is pre-populated and in this case, is only 74 characters so you may want to add some hashtags, a mention, and some more text explaining the content.
In case you wanna learn more about what a hashtag/mention is you should check out our article on understand twitter and using it to like a pro.
Klout appreciates content creators. Without them Klout would be nothing.
Klout knows this and they want people to feel incentivized to create awesome content.
The perks program provides discounts, VIP access, free products, and more.
All you need to do is fill out a influencer perks form and wait for them to reach out to you. I did that and I’ll update this section when I find out more.
Settings
This is where you set your integrations and account details. Pretty intuitive stuff here, so I won’t go into it, too much, just the facts.
Profile
Initially, you provided a name and last name, if your social accounts are for a brand you can switch to brand account in this section, next to First and Last name.
Networks
This is where you manage your profile links and social network integrations. The available integrations are:
- Facebook Profile
- Facebook Page
- Google+
- Blogger
- Flickr
- Foursqaure
- Last.fm
- Tumblr
- WordPress.com
- Yammer
- Youtube
You can change the email associated with your Klout account here and manage communication preferences. Options include:
- Account notifications and activity
- Advice and tips for improving my impact
- Exclusive Klout Perk offers
- Klout news and updates
Privacy
You can remove your account here, and also use a link to find out about how Klout regards the privacy of it’s users.
The gist of it:
Klout is a responsible company and there to give you insight on your publicly facing data, as well as educate you on how you can keep it private, if you want to.
More Clout
The word clout means: That you communicate with a sense of power and influence. It seems to me that using klout can help you do that more effectively.
I’ll update this article as I learn more, and if have any tips for you on how to be more productive with this cool social media tool.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and if you have anything to share please do.
One of the main reasons, I write these articles is to connect with others and share what I know and facilitate continued learning.
Live long and prosper.