We’ve talked about Klout.com before but in case you are new to it, Klout.com measures your influence on line across multiple platforms. They look for what topics you are most influential about that you talk about (tweet, post, comment on) on the social web. Recently they added LinkedIn to their repertoire of social outlets that they measure.
Even more recently they now allow you to pay it forward to your network. You can now give people +K and increase their Klout score by 1 if they influence you in a certain topic. You can only give 5 +K’s per day and figuring out how to do that is not super obvious. So here’s how you do it:
- Log into Klout.com
- Type in the Twitter handle of a person that influences you in the upper right.
- When their profile comes up, under where it says Influential about, click “See more” link. (see image below).
- Find the topic you think they are most influential about and next to that topic you’ll see the Give +K symbol. Click on it. (see image below).
You can also share with your network that you just gave someone a +K and if they see it, maybe they’ll return the favor.
Why is Klout important? So far it’s the only platform that can measure accurately what someone’s influence is and they are eagerly trying to become the standard for social web influence. It’s a great way for a company to measure their influence across the web on their products, services or even their brand. As an individual should you care? Depends on your purpose. If your job is in marketing, social media or you have something that you want to market and be influential about and known as an expert or thought leader, then it probably matters. If you just hang out on Twitter or Facebook to be social and don’t really care about who you influence, then you probably don’t need to worry about it.
Thanks – I’ve been searching Klout to figure out to give a K+ score to someone and your explanation is much easier to understand. Thanks.
Thanks Jeannette! I hope you come back for more social media help in the future. :-)