Well, do you? Does it matter?  Numerous stories have been written regarding the website Klout. They claim to be The Standard for Influence.  According to Klout, people whose score is 60+ rank in the top 5% of influencers across the internet.  Visit their About page and you’ll discover even their leadership team is not in the top 5%.  Three of the six are below the standard, including their VP of Marketing, the CTO and the SVP of Product.   The site, launched in 2008, has undergone many changes over the past five years, mostly how your score is calculated, after an uproar sent them scrambling.

Influence

The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.

Klout’s definition of Influence is “the ability to drive action. When you share something on social media or in real life and people respond, that’s influence. The more influential you are, the higher your Klout Score.”  These social media influences range from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

According to Klout;

The Klout Score isn’t the average of your influence across all your networks, it’s the accumulation. Adding networks adds to your ability to share your expertise, and that helps your Klout Score. If you remove networks and then add them back later it could take a few days for your Klout Score to readjust.

So can someone explain to me why, when all my social media pages are active, interactive and busier than ever, that my score continues to drop?  Does it really calculate based on the number of interactions over a period of time?  I am primarily a Facebook user. According to my stats, 49.5% of my score comes from Facebook, followed by Twitter at 40%, then Google+ and LinkedIn.  These percentages are not correct.  I am a huge Facebook user and a lesser user of Twitter.  These two should not be as close as Klout claims.  I’ve been carefully watching over the past 30 days and have also noticed that they only choose to show, on my profile page, the posts with the least interactions.  They also include, for the general public to view, Top Moments.  Again, how is this determined? What happened to the posts with the most interaction & how does this account for a proper score?

In the end, the number really doesn’t matter.  What matters is the clout you hold among your peers.  Without that, you might as well be a zero.

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