Posted by on Apr 12, 2011 in Social Media | 5 comments

A few months ago, I wrote about Klout, a tool that helps quantify “influence” on Twitter and Facebook. At the time, I was a staunch advocate: Klout wasn’t a perfect tool, but it was the best we had.

I’ve had a change of heart. Not only is Klout an extremely imperfect tool, often failing to update key statistics or just offering nonsense information (I tweet about RF? I don’t even know what that is!). I was also wrong in saying Klout is the best tool we have for measuring social media success. There are dozens of great metrics for social media success–and none of them involve an imaginary number.

We can measure success based on the new friends and business contacts we make. We can measure it by the strength of our relationships, how many people tell us that we made them laugh, cry, or think as a result of our messages. We can see our success in click throughs to our websites, and leads who tell us they saw us on social media.

Klout had the chance to be a useful tool in the social marketer’s toolkit, but squandered it by flat out not working properly and making people focus too much on a number instead of reaching out to the people they’re supposed to care about. After all, would you rather follow “an influencer,” or a friend?

...
Looking for regular doses of small business marketing ideas?  

Sign up for our newsletter and have the best of our fresh ideas about web design, social media and marketing strategy delivered to your desktop twice a month!



Sign Me Up
Email:  

More on This Topic

  • Alistair

    So what have you decided upon instead?

    I am in the process of investigating a couple of “feedback systems”, although not as ambitious as the information that klout purports to analyse:

    sendible.com
    fliptop.com

    Any thoughts/ experiences you can offer?

  • http://indysm.org Chuck Gose

    I wouldn’t give up on Klout yet. I do agree that people tend to focus on the one number (which may or may not be relevant) but it’s the other data included that I find helpful.

  • http://www.roundpeg.biz Allison Carter

    @Alistair: I think that the real problem with Klout is trying to reduce the complex world of “social media influence” to a pat number. It’s too simple, and it just won’t work. I recommend measuring clickthroughs, conversions to landing pages, retweets, conversations, etc. It really depends on your goals how you’ll measure social media success.

    @Chuck: I would agree with you, if the information updated regularly and accurately. For instance, as I mentioned in the post, under “most influential topics,” KIout lists “RF.” I have no idea what that is or when or why I would have tweeted about it, let alone why I’d be influential. It also sometimes seems to stall and not pull some of the other numbers correctly. If Klout could fix those problems, the metrics would be useful, but until then…

  • Ross Graham

    If the goal of the campaign that social media is being used as a part of is to get clickthrus, then use those to measure success. If it’s to get a higher Klout number, then use that as a measure of success. If it’s to build business and increase dollars at your organization, then use that as the measure of success.

    Social media shouldn’t operate in a vacuum. Whatever the goal of the communication that social media is a part of should be the driving metric in a campaign’s success/failure.

  • http://www.roundpeg.biz Lorraine

    Great point. If social media is going to be an effective part of your marketing mix, you need to hold it accountable with goals and performance measures.