When Klout first came out it seemed like a decent idea with limited appeal. If you were doing business with someone online and wanted to profile them at a glance it was a handy tool to pull together both Facebook and Twitter info on one spot without any information overload.
The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.
How does Klout influence SEO? Well head on over to our Klout score and take a look at what an honest Klout looks like from an organic SEO: BeanstalkSEO on Klout
See how there’s some influence and natural looking results? Now say you found the twitter name of our biggest competition on Google’s search results.. Go look at their Klout, see what’s missing?
Suddenly Klout has a role in defining who really listens/talks to who, what crucial networks they belong to, and when someone is just a source of noise/self importance, it shows.
You could get on Facebook, and Twitter, friend all the people you’re curious about and compare the results from the two networks, or you can just go look them up in Klout and save a bunch of time.
The only problem I have with Klout is that it’s rather proprietary with it’s support for just Facebook and Twitter. This means if you have an excellent profile on Wikipedia that’s linked to from lots of other Wiki pages, that would never effect your Klout score, but it’s one of many sources that probably should?
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 12:29 am
