Contrary to the popular myth, content is not king. It is important, yes, but not as important as found content. If I don’t see what you are posting, then you have no opportunity to influence me or change my thinking. The way the social media channels work now, I’m more likely not to see your content than to see it, and that changes things.
Whilst I appreciate what they have been trying to achieve, I’ve always taken my Klout score with a pinch of salt. My Klout score has always been a direct relation to the volume of updates I have been pushing out. Since I moved my principle channel from Twitter to Facebook, my score has dropped considerably, but have I become any more or less influential? I consider my real influence comes through my blog or the #tru
events that I host around the world, and Klout doesn’t really factor this in, although my mentions might go up as a result.
Although the actual algorithm is shrouded in a bit of mystery, the guide to Klout lists the signals they use to calculate your score as follows:
Facebook
Mentions: A mention of your name in a post indicates an effort to engage with you directly.
Likes: The simplest action that shows engagement with the content you create.
Comments: As a reaction to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
Subscribers: Subscriber count is a more persistent measure of influence that grows over time.
Wall Posts: Posts to your wall indicate both influence and engagement.
Friends: Friend count measures the reach of your network but is less important than how your network engages with your content.
Twitter
Retweets: Retweets increase your influence by exposing your content to extended follower networks.
Mentions: People seeking your attention by mentioning you is a strong signal of influence. We also take into account the differences in types of mentions, including “via” and “cc.”
List Memberships: Being included on lists curated by other users demonstrates your areas of influence.
Followers: Follower count is one factor in your Score, but we heavily favor engagement over size of audience.
Replies: Replies show that you are consistently engaging your network with quality content.
Google+
Comments: As a reaction to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
+1’s: The simplest action that shows engagement with the content you create.
Reshares: Reshares increase your influence by exposing your content to extended networks on Google+.
LinkedIn
Title: Your reported title on LinkedIn is a signal of your real-world influence and is persistent.
Connections: Your connection graph helps validate your real-world influence.
Recommenders: The recommenders in your network add additional signals to the contribution LinkedIn makes to your Score.
Comments: As a reaction to content you share, comments also reflect direct engagement by your network.
The important thing here is the emphasis on unique interaction and subscriptions in all of the channels, and your ratio of interactions to follower/friend/connection count. This is critical because edgerank (and whatever name LinkedIn and Twitter use to rank content), means that your content is only visible to people who interact with you. This is most evident on Facebook, but is relevant to Twitter and LinkedIn because your updates get pushed right down the stream or feed when there is little interaction. Equally, shares, likes and comments combined with authorship on Google+ will increase your ranking in personal search results amongst your social connections. Whichever way you look at it, interaction means visibility, and visibility presents the opportunity to influence.
Personally, I place the greatest importance on LinkedIn interactions, because my LinkedIn network has the greatest relevance to the areas I work in, and there is less interaction in this channel. I have calculated the relevance of my LinkedIn network at 70%, where as Facebook is closer to 45% (with a smaller network), and Twitter at close to 30%. (with my biggest network.). Whilst it seems Klout ranks all channels equally, your Klout score is a good indicator of interactions, hence visibility. If your not getting visibility, then you need to either reconsider how to get interaction from your updates by inviting comment or asking questions, or consider paying to promote your updates or tweets, which makes them visible to larger sections of your network. Whilst LinkedIn don’t yet offer “promoted” updates, I’m sure the facility won’t be too far away. It might well also be time to take more than a passing interest in your Klout score.
Bill
You can read the full guide to Klout scores HERE
I put this comment out on G+ as well…
Interesting spin Bill. One thing I continue to struggle with is that visibility is becoming a proxy for quality – and I know that isn’t the case. I’m more convinced than ever that curation is key today – more so than ever – and the one thing our mainstream media should have adopted. Instead they chose to compete with blogs, tweets, etc. and are losing – but if they could become some sort of quality police – that would be helpful for me.
People will counter that wisdom of crowds provides the curation function – but wisdom of crowds really only works when the crowd isn’t linked – and in our networks we’re all linked. Therefore a post gets put up – retweeted by “friends” and people who want to get on the good side of the author, or via automated reposting tools and boom… something that really isn’t all that original, interesting or thoughtful becomes visible and therefore valuable. Even when it’s not.
Thanks for commenting Paul. A couple of things I think you need to consider. Firstly, higher points are given for unique tweets and ratios of interaction to followers. The automatic retweet accounts tend to have a huge following, and a very low value, hence a low value. Secondly, this will apply equally to negative interaction. if lots of people slate your posts, you get increased visibility for the negative comments. The influence might just be that the author is an idiot. I’m more concerned that all of the algorithms calculate what we will like based on what we have interacted with in the past, or similar people/types of content. That might cut out a lot of noise, but it also closes off avenues to undiscovered or very different content.
Bill
You hit on my main concern – finding new voices. The algorithms can’t make judgement calls on quality so if something has little visibility but great content gets lost. I worry that we’ve gotten to the point where all we see are popular posts and tweets – shallow and easy to digest – but the real quality stuff just can’t break through. No one has broken that code yet.