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Do you need Klout (klout.com) - A Review

Review of Klout.com

 

Is Klout scam or useful?

Klout is a site that claims to help people and companies to "unlock their influence".

Basically, you connect all of your social networking sites and Klout scores you from 1 - 100. They claim that over 200K companies and over 620 million users use Klout. Keep those numbers in mind please, you will see in a bit where I am going with this.

I recently signed up to Klout after the 12th person told me it is really essential and important. Just another site that rates you. We need more of those, right?

Here is a great advice for new online businesses and especially new blogs: Do not use sarcasm in a post. Ever. The people do not know you, they do not see your facial expression and there is a good chance for misunderstanding. That said, I cannot help myself when it comes to Klout.

So here I am

Klout Review


It was news to me that I am an expert in the field of New Media (I bet now that you know I am an official expert you feel the sudden urge to sign up to my NEWSLETTER). And do you see the green box? Am I possibly even greater than I think? The yellow star indicates that you really know what you´re doing in the respective field.

Where it´s cut off and you see "Content Beta" it shows only two of my blog posts. The rest is tweets and pictures. For my two blog posts, it chose a random picture from my site. It actually chose advertisements that are in no relation to the content.

200K companies and 620 million users and a crucial feature is in beta?

Let´s look what else I am an influencing expert at:

Is Klout Scam?

Well, that´s ... interesting. I have heard the names of  most of the people I obviously have expertise on. I could not swear, but I think I saw the name "John Madden" in a Nike advertisement. Does he have to do with sports?

Can I PLEASE have a yellow star in Nietzsche as I did read his books?

Klout features

 

Klout rates you

 

That is the most important feature of the site. You might have seen that many people use their Klout picture on other social media sites and carry their rating with pride.

It is not a feature, but I would like to establish what I mean by "social media people" because I will refer to this term pretty often. "Social Media People" are great people. They are people like you and me who own online businesses that they wish to promote. Approximately half of them offer services and products in the area of social media, social marketing, and e-commerce.

Often, they have a large following. Of other social media people. They publish and re-share so much content that you cannot help but envy them for their fast reading skills. I mean...they do read the articles they share and re-share, right?

Klout offers content

That is a great thing. Klout offers content that you can share with one click to Facebook and Twitter.
But there are many other platforms that have the same feature. Some allow you to share to more than just two platforms. Others reward you for sharing content.
Hootsuite, for example, is a fabulous tool that allows you to find content to share, schedule it, measure it, analyze it. In addition to that HootSuite has modules that let you integrate lots of other modules. From CRM to ... you name it. Hootsuite also lets you share to more than just two sites.Klout, on the other hand, offers functionality that is not integrated and does not offer workflow features.

Klout offers promotions

Klout offers you to run promotions to get your content featured and enhance your reach. Is that feature interesting for your new business? Probably not.

In my opinion, the term "influencer marketing" kind of sets the expectations. It is always hard to measure the ROI on marketing expenses.

It is even harder to measure if having more social media people follow you leads to reaching more customers. Ever. The following of social media people often consists to a large part of other social media people.

Are Klout scores fake?

Klout works with a simple algorithm that counts shares, likes, and comments. It neither qualifies the platforms nor the content. I would not say that they are fake. But I say that Klout is not able to evaluate the quality of content and therefore, the score is fakish. It can be manipulated.
When I signed up I had a Klout score of fifty something. I think 56 it was.
I published an article on linkedin.
https://www.aurorasa-coaching.com/8-habits-of-successful-people
The article received 80 likes and more than 10 shares. That´s neat, right? So I went to Klout to find out how much my score went up.
Guess what. It went down. I am not kidding you. Obviously I had less re-tweets.
In the next 2 weeks my score went up to 61 for the sole reason that I worked hard on my content until....
I am always willing to try out something new if enough people tell me it´s great or someone makes a good argument. I did not and still do not think that (depending on the kind of your business) Pinterest is a valuable outlet.
But I signed up. Because I did not want the app on my phone (I don´t like apps that access my camera) I googled for a desktop alternative as Pinterest does not support uploads via computer. I found one. I uploaded my first picture and received the message: "Do you want 50 free likes". I hit "sure thing, bring it on". ... Well, I hit "yes". It also saw a checkbox labeled: "auto like". I clicked it.
As you can see it changed my Klout score to 64.
Automated (therefore fake) likes on a silly picture had more impact than a thoughtful, detailed article liked on a business platform by 80 professionals.
Did you ever wonder why people would tag you into some photo on Facebook? You know....the ones you hide on your timeline and unsubscribe from because the amount of comments from the people tagged into it result in notification spam.
That skyrockets your Klout score. People tag me on a picture with a cup of coffee, write "good morning" and up to hundreds of people comment on it. "Good morning, John boy." "Have a great day, John boy."
Hmmmmm. Does people writing "Good morning, John boy." (people my age will get the "John boy" thing) under a picture of a coffee cup really make me a more influential person? Or does it make potential clients unsubscribe from my feed because they think I am stupid?I guess that depends on your business. I am offering coaching and training and this kind of social interaction is not suited to serve my clients and potential clients.

Klout and conversions

Whatever you spend your precious time on. Please do consider the following:
  • WHO is my client?
  • WHAT´s on their mind?  What do they need?  What are their worries and wishes?
  • WHERE do they hang out?
Depending on your business it is likely that your client does not hang out on Klout. I will go one step further: For 90 % of businesses it is true that potential clients are not worried the faintest bit about your Klout score.
As we have seen before Klout claims to have 200K companies. Great for B2B? Not really.
First of all, the number does not tell you how many of those companies are active. Second of all: If you were an employee in a large or mid-size companies´ marketing department. And your job is to either handle advertisements or social media.How big of a chance you would be looking for content of a small biz to connect with them?

Earlier we learned that the number of "scored" (not necessarily active) number of users is 620 million. Wow. Really?

I guess it´s safe to say that the 200k companies did not each make thousands of employees sign up. So who is on Klout really?

You got it. Other small businesses like you and me.

Conclusion

 

  • For most small businesses Klout is not relevant.
  • The price to offer "perks" and feature your content requires a budget of 10k plus.
  • Depending on your business your customer might not even care about Klout and even less hang out there.
  • A high Klout score might or might not be related to quality content.
  • Fewer people would tag-spam you on sites like Facebook without sites like Klout.
  • There are other communities to find people who sincerely want to interact with you.
  • Social media people are the nice ones. That like your posts. Potentially without reading it. Clients are the ones who enter their credit card details and pay your bills.
  • Online buddies that give you feel well shares are great. When it comes to business they rarely lead to conversions. Clients are the ones that are harder to get to share your content. Buy they are the ones that potentially accept your offers and read your content.
    You can impress them with quality content. Not with pictures of coffee cups or a high Klout score.
  • The quality of social interaction is more important than the quantity.

Up your $$$ game!

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