All over the web, you will read about how people feel disappointed, insulted, or are otherwise against Klout (especially their new changes) and they are railing against the metric itself, in that they feel they are being scored or judged unfairly. The heart of Klout is, after all, exactly that. It is a metric, a score that is objectively derived by a third-party. This is one of the reasons I love it, because it is objectively derived.

Why I Use Klout

Klout measures influence through engagement; not followers or page views. Both of those are important metrics to watch, but reader loyalty is more valuable and engagement is how to achieve it.

As I said above, the Klout score is objective. Before you join and link your accounts, they build a score based on publicly available information that they are able to compile. Ultimately, the score benefits Klout more than it does the person that it applies to, but this only serves to make sure that the score’s validity is kept more or less realistic.

It behooves them to keep the score as accurate as possible to provide a greater value to their marketing partners. This serves to make it a good tool to measure how you are reaching your audience.

How I Use Klout

At the time of this posting my Klout score is 48 (47.54) and there are no topics that I am influential in. That score has been more or less steady over the last month, being 47 (46.22) a month ago.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve given thought to exactly what I actually want to focus on. I’m active on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, not really focusing on any group of things. My lack of identified topics is undoubtedly based on my pattern of posting about whatever topics come to mind.

So with that being said, I’ve decided to focus on writing about coding, social media, and some random pursuits. My goal is not to raise my Klout score or gain influenced topics, but rather to create content that will engage an audience and I will use Klout as the metric with which I will gauge the change.

In the next week, I will be putting together a PHP library for CodeIgniter that pulls data from the Klout API.