How to improve your Klout score
It’s been around for a while, but it seems that klout (a score of your influence on social networks) is gaining more momentum and looking to grow in importance, significance and impact in 2012.
The majority of people would never have given any thought to their klout score (if they even ever knew they had one), I know I didn’t. When first drafting this post I jumped on klout.com and checked out my score, and I received a score of 45 which I was actually pretty happy about, even though it’s out of 100, when I looked against some of the big players (i.e., @scobelizer gets an 80 who I apparently influence according to klout… must be some glitches in the system 
, @techcrunch gets an 86, @mashable gets an 89 the highest I’ve seen [edit: @justinbieber gets 100, of course], and @guykawasaki an 83) it seems a score in the 90’s is near on impossible.
What klout does (apart from the obvious, give you a score for social network importance) is point out to you the reality of your impact on social networks. It gives you at least some sort of insight that your tweets about what you are having for breakfast lunch and dinner really do just get in the way, nobody gives a crap what you just ate.
A good run down of how the score is generated is on the klout site here.
Reading through the page, one theme keeps popping up, how engaging are you? Are people enticed to follow the links you put out there, do they like what you say enough to retweet it to their followers, do they see you as enough of a leader in your niche to add you to a list? You’re after a bunch of yesses to those questions if you want a good klout score.
So how do you do it? A few quick tips:
- Don’t be bland, spice it up. What chances do you have of getting this retweeted “just had banana on toast for breakfast” zilcho. Think about it, do you care what I had for breakfast? All that tweet did was dilute your score.
- Jump all over breaking news. If you know of something going down that hasn’t hit the news yet, be the person to spread the news first and you’ll be rewarded with retweets and more importantly, reputation as a news breaker.
- Ask questions, and answer questions. An important factor of your klout score is your social engagement. Answering questions will also help you gain a reputation as a leader in your niche, and land you on lists which also helps boost your klout score.
- Converse with, and get known by habitual retweeters. Get on the radar of people likely to retweet and you’ll have an easier time getting those all important retweets (for this to work though, you need a lot of these type of followers otherwise it could work against you if it’s always the same people retweeting you).
- Converse with, and get known by popular / important people. The more high profile your followers are, the more important you seem not only to other people, but to the klout algorithm. Get in their good books and get a follow, and your score will go up. If you can get a retweet from them, and then their followers you’ll be in a good place.
- Use hashtags. Including any that pop up in the trending topics now and then. If you have something witty to say, throw it in and you’ll pop up in front of people following a trending topic, a great chance to pick up new followers.
I anticipate that in 2012 there’ll be apps popping up that will better guide you to a good klout score and tell you exactly what you are doing right and wrong to improve your score, what you need to need to focus more on and what you’re completely screwing up.
Have you kept an eye on your klout score? Will you focus on trying to increase yours in 2012?
[UPDATE] In the 2 weeks following this posts initial draft, after engaging with more with people and being less bland with my tweets, I’ve managed to increase my klout score to 53