Why I Quit Klout and You Should Too
For me it all started when Klout introduced their new algorithm, which slowly ate away at my Klout score. I dropped from the low 50s to the 40s with no end in sight. This small factor played into my decision to quit Klout.
My Reasoning
Who Cares?
The real reason I quit Klout is because in all honesty who actually cares? Klout supposedly measures influence, but who is Klout to define influence? On my profile, Klout suggested that a Facebook user who had deleted their profile months ago influenced me. If you are going to decrease my score on a daily basis, don’t tell me I’m influenced by someone who for all intensive purposes doesn’t exist. This feature is sort of pointless considering I know whose tweets and statuses I respond too, all this feature is doing is providing information to marketers.
Your Score is Just a Number
I understand the value of reaching key influencers, but a Klout score is just a number. Klout can try to tell you whom they think is influential about a given topic based on their algorithm, but at the end of the day you’re not going to want to contact me about the Icelandic Volcano, no matter what Klout says.
Klout topic pages might become a good way to find key “influencers” on a certain topic, but there are many other tools with the same function. I would prefer to use tools like Listorious. Listorious is a great tool for finding people to follow or finding people who tweet about a certain topic. If you go to Listorious and search a topic, let’s say volcanoes, it will show you Twitter users or Twitter lists who tweet about volcanoes. Surprisingly, I won’t make that list!
The best way to find a key influencer is to monitor key hashtags related to your topic. If you want to find influencers for social media, you could monitor #socialmedia or #sm and see who gets a lot of retweets or replies. I think this is more effective than Klout, because when you monitor a hashtag you can see who is actively following and engaging with a certain hashtag.
Finally, your Klout score is just a number! I would rather hear from my friends and followers that they enjoy my tweets or posts. Klout is a business! They are scoring you, so they can convert your “influence” into money from brands and marketers. Klout ranks your influence based off your score and determines what “perks” you qualify for. If brands are planning to treat me differently just because a have a higher or lower Klout score shame on them and my friends and followers will hear about it!
I wish Klout all the best and I plan to check back in the next few months, but until then check out the cute little puppy that has replaced my profile: http://klout.com/loebben. Let me know what you think of Klout in the comment section.
*Note: here is a blog post from Charles Stross on the privacy concerns related to Klout:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/evil-social-networks.html
Comments
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Filed Under: Advice • Facebook • Technology • Twitter
Your article inspired me to quit Klout, too. I never felt comfortable with the privacy and the influence chart is as accurate as stockmarket predictions these days.
There is a big #fail with having secret parameters that “measure” your influence, in fact these parameters should be transparent and open.
[...] related to my good friend, Klout. I am being facetious here and recently wrote a blog post about quitting Klout. In case you don’t know, Klout is an internet company that “measures online [...]