#kloutscore... A Tempest in a Teapot?

Some time ago I was introduced to Kloutscore... Basically a company that measures your reach or impact on the internet. And being a critical person, I was somewhat hesitant of jumping the bandwagon.

The idea is great; "Be Known for What You Love". And the idea of measuring how you affect your followers is great, but in my mind it doesn't really work with Kloutscore.

You see, Kloutscore only measures your score from when you JOIN, yet still calculates a score from a time before you joined. As you can see in the picture below, I joined Klout on May 12th. Which caused a MASSIVE growth in my Kloutscore. But I did not quite understand why it wasn't higher before. As an example I made an epic April fools prank on facebook generating more than 75 likes. Yet, as you can see, on my calculated Kloutscore before May 12, it is very bleak. So naturally I asked the support team behind Kloutscore what was up.

 

Michelle answered me: "Please also note that the score is not just based on the pure amount of retweets/likes/etc. you receive. We also take into account how influential the people you are interacting with. If the CEO of Twitter retweets your content, this is worth a lot more compared to your average user." (email dated June 17th 2014)

Naturally I took up the challenge and added my Twitter account, my Instagram, my LinkedIn etc. On Klout you can connect many different social media, but you can only see details of your impact on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. So when Kloutscore tells me I have a 6% impact from LinkedIn, I cannot find out how.

And this how would be very interesting if I was to track and evaluate how to better impact people on said media.

From what I can deduct, the percentage of your Kloutscore is measured in a comparison with your previous scores. Which is both good and bad. It means that when you first join Klout you are able to quickly grow your score to a high level. But as time progress your score will be harder to increase, because 45 people liking your post is no longer the highest possible score impact you can have (and you need those celebs re-tweeting your wisdom).

My point is that you should take your kloutscore with a grain of salt. It will give you a great overview of which social media you have the highest impact on, but it will not do more than that. Unless you are a celebrity or a large corporation, your kloutscore is only good for boosting your own ego.