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
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:

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
Klout offers promotions

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 and conversions
- WHO is my client?
- WHAT´s on their mind? What do they need? What are their worries and wishes?
- WHERE do they hang out?
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.