Three months ago, I never would have thought
that I was going to write this post.
I checked my Klout score every day, then— I
wasn’t obsessed with it or anything, but I liked to see how what I did or
didn’t do affected my score. For the most part I watched it rise (I went from
low 40s in May to 60 by August), and it was fun to give people +K and watch my
Klout topics grow and change.
It was a service I enjoyed, so I checked in on
it.
For those of you who don’t know, Klout is a
service that measures your online influence across various social media sites
and gives you a score of 1-100. The average Klout score is pretty low, so a 50
or 60 is a pretty decent score and anything above 70 is considered very good.
For a better explanation of how they determine your score, you can check out their
explanation page .
So when they announced they were going to
update the way they measured influence about a month or so ago, I thought it
might mess with my score, but I didn't worry about it much. If it dropped a few
points, I'd survive. Big deal.
The Klout update was released. My score
dropped from a near 61 to 54. Ouch.
I tried not to worry too much about it.
I figured with some time I'd be able to recover and it wouldn't be a big deal.
I continued to use my social media sites like I always did and waited for it to
climb back up.
It didn't—in fact, my score continued to drop.
Even when I got a lot of retweets on Twitter, my influence across social media
continued it's rather ungraceful nosedive.
Or did it?
I hadn't changed much. Sure I wasn't on
Twitter as often as before, but I was still sharing the same content and
keeping up with my blog and tumbling just about everything I thought was
interesting. My following on different social media sites continued to grow,
Klout or no Klout. Did my score really affect my influence online?
Honestly? I don't think it did.
True, my Klout score was dropping, which would
indicate that my influence in the social media sphere was dropping, but the
responses from my readers and Twitter/tumblr followers didn't seem to match my
dropping score. It occurred to me that I was putting too much weight on my
Klout score.
Is Klout a useful service? I think it is,
especially those involved in businesses where social media influence is a big
deal. But it stopped becoming useful to me when I started worrying about my
nosediving score that didn't seem to change no matter what I tried, rather than
what my reception was online. What could have been a useful measurement became
instead (to me) a source of stress.
So I stopped caring.
Will I check my influence online via Klout in
the future? Maybe. But as long as my readers and followers like you guys keep
being awesome, I'm perfectly happy with whatever influence I have.
Do you watch your Klout score? Am I the only
one who stressed out about it?
