Does Klout Live Up to Its Name?

Your business’ social media campaigns – tweets, comments, shared links – what are they worth? (Our latest market brief looks into this question, and the better-understood tools you can use to find out and measure the ROI of these efforts.) Klout is the latest platform to attempt to measure social influence, and, although introduced in 2008, is just now starting to gain traction after making many major changes in the last few months. Most noticeably, it originally only factored Twitter statistics into its method, but now evaluates 11 social media platforms, from LinkedIn to Instagram.

Klout analyzes your activity on these sites and the activity of those you are connected to, and comes up with three basic measures for success. After the numbers have been crunched, Klout spits out your Kloutscore from 1-100 and voilà – a standard for influence. You can also see who you’re influencing most, and on which subjects you’re most influential. It’s currently rolling out its Topics page, which reports on social media conversations around a given topic from top influencers.

But does Klout have any clout of its own?

There are plenty who believe that it’s useless, others who are embracing it, and a few who believe it’s just another tool to game. Criticisms or not, people seem to at least be curious as Klout recently announced it calculated its 100 millionth score.

So there’s no clear consensus on Klout. But with social marketers always looking for new tools to measure success, and Klout being a new way to make the attempt, it is something with which businesses should at least experiment.

Whichever side you take in the Klout debate, more similar tools will surely come – maybe with businesses purely in mind. The social media landscape and other technologies change so often Klout will have a lot of work to do in order to keep ahead and prove its validity.