With so much Klout bashing out there, I thought I would add more fuel to the fire. First of all, Klout is a proprietary tool intended to measure influence. As tweeters, we take pride in our high Klout scores, scoff at its validity when we get low scores, and game our way to the highest score possible.
If you want to game it and get a high schore, here are a few tips:
- join in several twitter chats particularly those where the people have high Klout (e.g., blogchat)
- tweet only to people who have high Klout scores
- tweet on weekdays, weekends, holidays, days, and nights
- connect your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.
You’ll be rewarded with high Klout even if everyone thinks you’re a total douchebag.
It’s also a fun thing for number geeks to play with. The numbers go up and down on a daily basis, and we can make pretty charts with them. As a geek who’s used charts as positive reinforcement on myself, this makes perfect sense.
If you really want to see how fun Klout is, run some Klout stats on @MRXblogs. That’s a bot I created which shares blog posts about market research. It replies to no one, retweets no one, and never goes to the bathroom. Its Klout is 46. That’s actually quite good even for regular human tweeters. But would you buy social media research from @Conversition if @MRXblogs tweeted one of their blog posts? I doubt it. Though feel free to prove me wrong.
So what is wrong with Klout? Nothing. Nothing at all. I suspect they have plenty of analysts and statisticians who have already thought of all our complaints and have already worked hard to resolve the ones that can be resolved. Remember – they are attempting to deal with innumerable special cases which simply cannot be solved by changing Z = X + Y to Z = X + Y + W. If it was that simple, they would have already done it.
So enjoy your Klout toy. It’s free and it’s fun. What more do you need.
Related articles
- Does Klout Have Clout? (compete.com)
- Klout Score is Blind Luck At Best (esmoretti.com)
- New Services Coming To Klout (thetechscoop.net)
- Klout – not perfect, but not to be ignored, either” (wordspring.ca)
The LoveStats Blog 
[…] not referring to its many inaccuracies, although you can read about those here, here, here, here, and here. I’m saying that your Klout score, framed ever so beautifully in a font I […]
Also, hard to say how the upcoming Foursquare integration makes any sense from an influence standpoint. Silly.