There has been a new development on the net - klout.com. Klout is San Francisco based company that provides social media analytics that measures a user’s “influence” across their social networks. The analysis is done by collecting data from the person’s Twitter and Facebook account and measuring the size of person’s network, the content created, the interaction of other people with the content.
The influence is measured on a scale of 1 to 100 with higher scores representing higher influence. It uses four parameters to arrive to a final score, what is known as Klout Score. The parameters are:
The influence is measured on a scale of 1 to 100 with higher scores representing higher influence. It uses four parameters to arrive to a final score, what is known as Klout Score. The parameters are:
- True Reach: Number of people influenced. It is the actual engaged audience of the user and is based on number of followers on twitter and facebook friends who actually interact with the user
- Amplification: It is how much people are influenced by the user. It measures the retweets, @messages, comments and likes on twitter and facebook.
- Network Score: Influence of people on true reach. It measures how influential is the audience based on the true reach.
These parameters generate a single combined score from 1 to 100. The actual implementation of how the scoring mechanism works is kept secret (obviously) but in my opinion they have got some excellent algorithms to find out how the user is influential in his social network. It also gives a list of topics user influences most people about. This has the potential to generate lots of money. But more on that later.
This is one step ahead of social networking. Facebook has 750 million+ users and Twitter has 200 million+ users. People know what social networking is. This is the new tool to measure how you actually influence people on your social network.
It was co-founded in 2008 by two geniuses - Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran. Joe is currently the CEO and Binh is the CTO (Chief Technological Officer) of Klout. According to the data on Klout, Binh started programming at the early age of 13 and was a game programmer and then turned into a big data cruncher and then joined Klout. Joe has worked on Education and Real Estate platforms and is now currently experimenting on Social platform. Currently, Klout has scored 80 million people and is spreading slowly by word of mouth and promotions. Personally, I feel it doesn’t need advertising. It is a new thing and everybody would want to try it.
One thing that came to my mind is - how does klout earn money? Klout earns by knowing what actually people are influenced by. It is one step ahead than advertising. Social Networking only counts the number of followers or friend count - but Klout considers the actual thing that is happening. It measures what people are talking about, and what message they are spreading. According to the data on klout.com, it is being used by more than 3000 brands and applications. It lists brands like Nike, Audi, Universal, Turner, HP, Disney, Spotify, Virgin America, P&G, Subway, Fox and Paramount on its website as its clients and also has various PDFs on how some brands are actually leveraging the Klout perks (url: http://klout.com/corp/perks).
Klout has recently added LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube and Blogger accounts to measure the influence in a better way. klout.com is a great start. In 3 years it has rated 80 million individuals and many brands are now taking advantage of this service. In my opinion, we have just added another way to advertise. There is always something new happening in this world, and this shows that facebook and twitter are definitely not the end to it.
P.S. : My klout score is 54. And readers, you can increase it.
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