The Rebirth of Klout and Social Media Influence

Do you feel like social media changes far too often for you? Whether it’s Facebook and the battle of the marketers or LinkedIn’s content sharing update, you might be sick to death of this industry’s fluctuations.

Unfortunately, today’s post is no different. While the most popular social media networks have stayed relatively consistent, the way marketers use them evolves daily — and the fall of popularity and the rise of social media influence is the next big thing.

When users first began joining social media platforms, marketers were obsessed with followers and relative popularity. The largest number of followers wins; whether that’s on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. But 2014 is emerging with a different, more intelligent bent: it’s not about sheer numbers, it’s about how many of those numbers engage with the content. That is, it’s about influence.

Klout’s Rising Clout

Klout, the social media influence application, has been a problem child from the beginning. It seemed like a great idea at first — a radical amount of data at the hands of hungry marketers. But when its algorithm faltered and its vision for the future seemed unsure, marketers abandoned the platform…but apparently never the idea.

Klout was recently acquired, and it’s back in a new form. The influence platform is keeping its scoring algorithm and positioning itself as a content sharing platform. The new Klout allows users to publish and schedule content on their favorite topics and become well known for it, ideally building a following (and more clout).

Using Klout for Business

What matters here is not how much money Klout was acquired for ($100 Million) but what Klout can do for your business. Here’s how to put it to work:

• If you have the budget, offer perks. Klout analyzes users by engagement and influence, and offers those users partnerships with your business. If you have the budget (approximately $25,000USD) it’s worth the cost to identify, court, and encourage the influencers within your market to try out and review your product and services.

• Use Klout users as marketing personas. Even without a five-figure budget, there’s no reason you can’t use Klout to your benefit. Identify power users in your physical location or keyword market and analyze their habits, updates, and interests. Use the information these users freely provide to build more accurate marketing personas based on their Klout scores.

• Study content suggestions for your business’s internal use. Klout offers its users “content suggestions” to help them brainstorm interesting things to write about. A business could easily use these suggestions to develop their own blog posts, or to guide internal decision-making processes.

Influence and engagement are the new deciders in the world of social media marketing. It’s not the user or the brand with the most followers — it’s the user or the brand with the highest engagement and conversation that will reap the conversions.

Are you using Klout to dip your toes into the world of social media influence? Why or why not?