Klout is an online tool, used to measure a user or brands influence online. The algorithm pulls in many different factors and rankings to produce a score, from 0-100 of your online influence, or ‘Klout’.

To sum it up:

Jeff from down the street who only has Facebook and posts 1 picture of his cat once a month, and receives no likes on it, will most likely have a low Klout score. That major brand you follow on every social network, receive millions of likes, comments and shares on every post and are always actively engaging and interacting with users? They’ll have a higher Klout score.

Many people will sign up to Klout in a one-time effort to view their Klout score, and gently monitor it over time. The Klout site, and mobile app, offers much more potential than a simple gradually changing number – make sure you, and your small business, are making the most of Klout.

Get the most out of Klout

Klout has many more features, other than a number in a little orange box. Follower suggestions, content sharing, content searching, scheduling and measuring. Find out more about them below:

Klout will learn your interests and influential topics and suggest people to follow who share the same interests and knowledge. This can be great for both populating your twitter feed with relevant and similar users who you will find engaging, as well as getting your face, name or brand out there.

A good trick for any company starting out on social media is to follow people or companies in a similar niche. Klout does all the legwork for you, so you’re simply pressing a button.

Finding content on the internet isn’t the hardest task in the world – after all, you found this easily enough. What is hard, however, is sifting through the content that isn’t relevant to you, your interests, your followers or to your taste. This is where Klout steps in, again.

Klout searches the web for content that is relevant to your interests and influential topics, much like with the follower suggestions. It also includes content branded as ‘Hot Off the Press’, for those articles that have been published recently, such as 1 or two hours ago. These topics often haven’t been picked up by many, and can help you become one of the first influencers to share it around.

Sharing the right content to the right people is only half getting engagement – arguably the biggest challenge is pushing your content out at the right time! You may have stumbled across the next best thing on the internet, but pushing it out when all of your followers are asleep, or pre-occupied with work, will see it get buried under the avalanche of content spat out by the internet every day.

Klout uses an algorithm which tracks the best times to share your content, and this is personalised to each person, taking in location, following, and other demographics. For me, the best times were suggested to be 10:45AM, 3:00PM or 5:15PM – if you’re reading this article close to one of those timeframes, there may be a good reason why!

Klout’s measuring capabilities stretch much further than just a little number inside an orange box. You can view graphs of your score fluctuation (Maybe you went on holiday with some web downtime, and want to see how that affected your score), you can view which posts actually add value to your score as well as the network contribution, to see what channel really brings in the authority.

If your Facebook page makes up 50% of your overall Klout authority, then you know to focus your efforts more on that channel, whilst trying to learn from how you post, to implement onto your other channels.

Thoroughly examining the measure page will give you a great idea of what works, what doesn’t, and how you can improve!

Perks are something which are relatively out of user’s control, apart from opting in to receive them. If you do happen to receive a perk through clout, however, it is well worth trying them out and leaving feedback. Not only will you get yourself a free service, trial, or offer, you will always be seen as an authority in your niche by offering helpful and insightful feedback.

Try it today!

Whether you’re a current user who doesn’t quite get the most out of Klout, or this is the first you’ve heard of it, try it out today and see how much of a difference you can make to your online influence score!