Klout: Why I Stopped Caring About My Score

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?