What is a Klout Score?
The Klout Score is a numerical representation of the size and strength of a person's sphere of influence on Twitter. The scores range from 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. The size of this sphere is calculated by measuring true reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Strength of influence is calculated by tracking interactions across your social graph to determine the likelihood of someone listening to or acting upon any specific message.
We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action -- "action" might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link. We perform significant testing to ensure that the average click-through rate on links shared is highly correlated with a person's Klout Score. The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people.
How is Klout Calculated?
The Klout Score is derived from measuring 25+ variables in the following categories:
True Reach -- This is the size of your engaged audience. This number will be smaller than the number of followers you have because we subtract spam followers and inactive accounts. Klout calculates influence for each individual relationship, so we also subtract the people who you have little influence over. For example, if you are followed by a person who follows 5,000 other people and you two have never interacted, share very few common friends, and generally don't tweet about the same topics, it's likely that your tweets are barely seen by this person, and you probably have little to no influence over them. On the other hand, if a person takes the time to put you on a Twitter list, it means they really value the content you produce, and will increase the influence you have over them.
True Reach is broken into the following subcategories:
- Reach
- Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
- How far has your content been spread across Twitter?
- Are people adding you to lists and are those lists being followed?
- Demand
- How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?
- Are your follows often reciprocated?
Factors measured: Followers, Friends, Total Retweets, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, @ Mention Count, List Count, List Followers Count.
Amplification Ability -- This is the likelihood that your message will generate retweets or spark a conversation. The ability to create content that compels others to respond, or increase the velocity of content so that it spreads into networks beyond your own is a key component of influence.
Amplification Ability is a composite of the following subcategories:
- Engagement
- How diverse is the group that @ messages you?
- Are you broadcasting or participating in conversation?
- Velocity
- How likely are you to be retweeted?
- Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?
- Activity
- Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience?
- Are your tweets effective in generating new followers, retweets and @ replies?
Factors measured: Unique Retweeters, Unique Messages Retweeted, Follower Retweet %, Unique @ Senders, Follower Mention %, Inbound Messages Per Outbound Message, Update Count.
Network Score -- This is a measurement of how influential the people who retweet, @ mention, list and follow you. Each time a person performs one of these actions it is a testament to your authority and the quality of your content. Capturing the attention of influencers is no easy task, and those who are able to do so are typically creating spectacular content. The more influential the people who retweet, @ mention, list or follow you, the higher your Network Score will be.
Network Score looks at the Klout score of each person who interacts with you to determine:
- How influential are the people who @ message you?
- How influential are the people who retweet you?
- How influential are the people who follow you?
- How influential are the people who list you?
- How influential are the people who follow the lists you are on?
The 25+ variables used to generate scores for each of these categories are normalized across the whole data set and run through our analytics engine. After the first pass of analytics, we apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final Klout Score.
Reach
- Followers230
- Total Retweets0
- Friends79
Demand
- @ Mention Count2
- Follower/Follow Ratio1.78
- Followed Back %61 %
Engagement
- Follower Mention %1 %
- Inbound Msgs Per Outbound Msg0.05
- Unique @ Senders2
Velocity
- Unique Messages Retweeted0
- Unique Retweeters0
- Follower Retweet %0 %
