As a blogger myself, I have a love hate relationship with Klout, a measure of social influence, and am aware of its many flaws. Klout has come under a lot of scrutiny over the last few years for its lack of transparency, dodgy privacy rules and questionable algorithm. However, many Brands/PRs still use this as trusted measure of influence when deciding who to reach out to online.
One of my biggest complaints was the exclusion of a number of platforms. In my case, the fact that it doesn’t include self-hosted WordPress blogs. However, I’ve done a bit of research and as far as I can tell, this hasn’t negatively impacted me that much. I asked a few fellow friendly bloggers, to disconnect their Blogger blogs for a few days to see if it affected their scores and it didn’t.
However, late last week I noticed that my Klout score had jumped 4 places. After a quick Google search, I learned that Klout is now including Instagram, an online photo-sharing and social networking service, to its algorithm.
‘Over 77 percent of users who have connected their Instagram accounts will see a score increase between 1 and 5 points’
Is this an attempt to rebuild its reputation? What does this mean for businesses? Will it make the site more credible and relevant? Is this a reaction to the increasing popularity of Kred?
Hopefully we will see more platforms being added to Klout in future so we can confidently use it as a trustworthy measure of online influence.