How to Increase Your Klout Score

If Klout is important, then asking how you can raise your score is certainly a natural enough question. You might even be trying to decide how much you can guess about the algorithm and how you can turn your guesswork to your own advantage.

What is Klout?

Klout has been around since 2009, but it only really seems to have started gaining lots of ground and attention very recently. Suddenly, Klout scores are popping up everywhere, a sort of “bragging rights” metric that gives people a snapshot of how important they seem to be to the social media world. But what is Klout, exactly?

Klout is a free social media tool that lets you measure your effectiveness at engaging your audience with valuable content. It combines the best aspects of a pure “metrics” tool with the functionality of a social media platform. Of course, that’s not the real question. The real question is: how do you turn all of this into new leads and sales for your business?

Demonstrating Your Brand

One of Klout’s greatest strengths is its ability to show you exactly which topics you’re dominating as an influencer. If you’re not getting any topics at all then your focus is probably too broad. If you’re trending for all the wrong topics then you will know it is time to adjust what you’re doing. You can also gain more traction in a topic when someone else chooses to give you +K for it—a stamp of approval which indicates you’re giving your audience exactly what they’d like to see.

Measure Your True Reach

If you’ve ever wondered how many of your followers are actually paying attention to your content then Klout will prove very useful. Klout gives you something called a “true reach” score. You may have 1,000 followers on Twitter, but if only 3 of them are responding, sharing, or clicking then something is very wrong. Getting followers is easy. Standing out from the general noise is the hard part.

Another Source of Social Proof

You can display your Klout score across a number of forums. In fact, you currently have a score whether you’ve ever interacted with Klout or not. For better or for worse, Klout is starting to gain a lot of attention, and people will make assumptions: namely, that a higher Klout score indicates greater niche authority. Raising your Klout can’t happen unless you’re actively doing everything you can to create this kind of authority to begin with, however. It’s a clear case of success breeding success.

How to Increase Your Score on Klout

If you are new to Klout, the absolute fastest (and easiest) way to bump up your score is by adding all your social networks and services to your account: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr, Instagram and Last.fm. You may not have accounts with all these services, add as many as you can. I've seen many people double their score after connecting all their accounts.

You can start taking control of your Klout profile and score by visiting klout.com.

Once you've added all your social media accounts you should see your score go up. After that it's a little more involved to build your score. In truth, trying to make guesses about the Klout algorithm is the wrong way to go about things.  There is a social proof benefit to having a high Klout score, of course, but it’s not the end-all, be-all of what Klout has to offer. Klout is, first and foremost, a metric that measures your performance -a valuable  tool that tells you how well you are engaging your networks. It makes no sense to “game” your Klout score. Gaming the Klout system would do little more than reduce the usefulness of the measurement, which tells you whether or not anything you are sharing is actually worth reading in the eyes of your audience. If you want to see better numbers you’ve got to take the time and make the effort to put out better content.

Don't Worry About Your Score!

Having the mentality that you must grow your score iconically allows you to avoid some of the truly bad, shallow advice on Klout that you can find all over the internet. Some people advocate raising your Klout scores in ways that aren’t very respectful of other people. For example, some people advocate ignoring anyone whose scores are “too low,” because lower scores supposedly bring down your own scores.

One blogger even went so far as to say that people with low scores aren’t “important” enough to associate with. This kind of thinking reeks of the behavior of high school cliques. Such a mentality is too selfish to be conducive to the kind of relationship marketing that has transformed the relationship between customers and the people who provide their product and service. It also ignores the fact that the boost you get from Klout will only take you so far: if you’re not genuinely “about” helping your customers, if, instead, you’re all about what others can do for you, then your business isn’t like to succeed, even if you manage to get a Klout score of 100.

Klout will back this up, saying that the absolute best way to increase your Klout score is to “constantly offer great content that people want to share and respond to.” In other words—keep using social media effectively, and your Klout score will follow!