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Aug 14, 2012

Klout Revamps Website and Scoring To Provide More Information on Your Social Media Influence

If you’re a social media junkie you’re undoubtedly familiar with Klout, the site and service that rank people on their social media influence.  Klout rates users or gives them Klout scores based on a number of criteria, including but not limited to how many people follow them on Twitter, “Like” their Facebook statuses, recommend them on LinkedIn, etc.)

But even if you aren’t a social media junkie or you could care less about your Klout score, the latest version of the service, being released today, might change that.

“We heard from people that visiting Klout made them feel analyzed and judged. We want people to feel listened to and important,” Klout CEO Joe Fernandez told ABC News.

Fernandez and his team are rolling out two major improvements today. The first is an entirely new scoring algorithm. The site now uses much more data to collect information and score the influence people have relative to others. (Klout says it now uses 400 inputs and analyzes 12 billion data points everyday.)

It also now takes into account real world influence from Wikipedia. So someone like Paul Ryan, who has a new Twitter account, should still have a fairly high Klout score. That is, if he actually signed up to use the service.

But the score, even though it should be more accurate now, is being pushed into the background with a redesigned site.

“The score was always the tip of the iceberg.  It was helpful because it was digestible, but it was also pretty blunt. We wanted the functionality and the context to stand out,” Fernandez said.

The new site includes a timeline of your “moments,” or the tweets or status updates that saw the most engagement with friends. The timeline shows those moments, how much engagement happened around them (retweets, responses, etc.), and if you influenced other Klout users. It shows them plotted on a line graph.

A dashboard at the top of your page slides out to show your core social media stats — your Twitter followers, your retweet numbers, etc. Your Klout score just appears on the top of the page next to your name. Even on your profile page, it’s just a small box next to your name, rather than a huge number in the center.

The new scoring algorithm will start being put into effect today for all users, while the new site design will start rolling out to users on an incremental basis.


Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

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