3 Reasons to Relax About Your New Klout Score
Klout, the online tool that tracks your social media activity and claims to rank your influence there, retooled the way they calculate those rankings last week. The change resulted in a reported thousands of Klout users seeing major drops in their Klout scores. And that has many of the site's users freaking out.
The concern is misplaced, though. Here's why.
It's only one metric
Your Klout score is only one of the possible success measures that you could be tracking. And it's far from one of the most important measures.
If Justin Bieber — one of the most influential people on the planet, according to Klout — retweets you it'll drive your Klout score through the roof. But if you're a financial planner, is that really useful to your business? Does it relate at all to your business goals?
For small businesses results matter, so the truly important things to track are your social media results — things like the traffic that your social media activity drives to your Web site and the number of qualified leads it generates.
It's arbitrary
What else can you call it, other than arbitrary, when your score can fluctuate wildly from one day to the next. And the logic that Klout uses to calculate your influence gets pretty circular pretty quickly. What's one of the biggest drivers for your Klout score? The influence people in your network have. And what drives their influence score? The influence of the people in their network. And how do we know how influential those people are? Well, by the influence of the people in their network. And… well, it goes around and around.
It's relative
Where your Klout score can be useful is in figuring out where you stand relative to your peers. If your Klout score is substantially lower than many of your competitors', it may be an indication that you're missing an opportunity to use social media to drive meaningful business results.
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