How To Figure Out If You Are You Influential on Social Media: Kred & Klout
Influence is an important factor for your online presence.
And it’s NOT about how many followers you have.
It has to do with how much you actually engage and incite people to action.
This is why it’s very important to not only publish great, relevant information, but it’s also important to respond, share great posts from others and simply participate in Social Media.
I personally think this is NOT a good idea.
People should be hired based on their competencies. Companies should not rely on these tools to determine who is or isn’t influential. Some people with a smaller social media circle may be very influential, and I’ve personally known very “influential” people online who know how to game the system.
So these tools should be looked at as entertainment. They are not necessarily the most reliable, quantifiable resources.
Nevertheless, here are some of the most popular tools to determine “influence”
Kred.
According to the article on Techcrunch, “Every person or account on Twitter has a Kred score, which is made up of two parts: the influence score and the outreach score”
- how often your tweets are retweeted
- how many new followers you are gaining
- how many replies you generate
are just some of the factors.
Taking a look at my stats on Kred, I found some interesting things:
My Communities categories are: travel, parents, marketing, automotive, reporters.
I would have to presume that the only reason these have been outlined as my categories is because the people who I connect with and those who tweet with me are within these categories.
If you are looking at my feed, I haven’t shared anything about travel, parents, automotive or reporters. The majority of information I share is about marketing.
I do think it’s interesting to see the “cloud” of words I use the majority of time when I’m tweeting.
And like others when they received their “Congratulations, you’re the top 1% on LinkedIn” it gave me a nice feeling to hear I’m on of the top 1% on Kred (however, since there are millions of people who receive the same message, it doesn’t make you feel so special afterall)
Klout
There has been a lot of controversy about Klout as they changed their algorithm and many people don’t believe that their Klout score is credible.
According to this article on Mashable, There are many variables that determine a Klout score.
Personally, I’m not comfortable sharing my personal Facebook connections on Klout – so this may have a bearing on my overall scoring.
Is 60 a good score? It depends on what you’re measuring against.
I do participate in Social Media. I engage. I respond. I post relevant information.
Many of my Twitter friends have similar Klout scores, so I would have to presume that the weighting of this algorithm has a lot to do with how many and how often you tweet along with how many followers you have.
So what IS influence, really?
Brian Solis defines influence as the ability to cause, affect, or change behavior
Are you influential? I think it would take more than just looking at scores like this to determine your actual credibility.
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