Now that the Wall Street Journal is writing about them, you probably already know about Klout. If you’re using Hootsuite, your Klout score, and the Klout score of your followers, is front-and-center. Here are four ways you can increase your Klout score.
- Get important people to talk about you. Klout measures the visible vestiges of influence. Getting people who already have Klout scores to retweet your tweets or in some other way mention you enables you to ride the draft of their influence. You can find these people by using Klout’s business service. You might check out HubSpot’s listing of Twitter Elite, too. Follow them on Twitter, retweet them, and if they don’t notice you, you can use a Twitter mention to ask them to retweet you. If you’ll get important people to talk about you, you can increase your Klout score.
- Stay away from people who aren’t important. Be careful about who you follow on Twitter. People with low Klout scores and people who are inactive on Twitter can bring you down. Remember the old adage about associations. Klout knows the score of all of your followers. You’re ranked by the company you keep. If you’ll keep company mainly with important people, you can increase your Klout score.
- Get more people to appear to pay attention to you than you’re paying attention to. Simply stated, make sure there are a lot more people following you on Twitter than you’re following. You can accomplish this by aggressively following people (but not TOO aggressively, probably no more than 300 to 400 per day, and not all at once either) and then waiting until a week or two after they follow you back to unfollow them. If you can attract more followers than followings, you can increase your Klout score.
- Find something that’s trending already and then re-amplify it. This is where using the web version of Twitter comes in handy. With it, you can see the top trending topics and then click on them to reveal popular content. The rest is easy, either use the auto-retweet button, or do a classic retweet so you can edit the trending tweets to add a bit of your own personality to the content. Of course, be sure you keep the trending keyword in your tweet!
By now you’ve probably picked up on the underlying current—it looks like the Klout-kind of influence is not so much about creating a wave as catching a wave. Just as a surfer rests in the water while he scans the horizon for the next wave, you, too can lurk on Twitter and pay attention to the people and content swelling in the distance.
The key to increasing your influence online
None of the suggestions mentioned above have anything to do with real influence. Real influence is complex, multifaceted, and environmentally constrained (time, space, people, place, topic, occasion, etc.). Influence is more significant than two digits can capture (though Klout is necessary nonetheless).
I certainly don’t fully understand influence; I can’t even fully define it. For the rest of my life, I’ll probably keep reading all those unending books on leadership, marketing, psychology, influence, persuasion (that there’s a non-stop supply of new books on the topic ought to be a big clue that influence is WAY more than digits). Even so, as I ponder the real keys to increasing real influence, the words of Zig Ziglar ring in my ears and reverberate in my heart. A definite key to increasing your influence is found is Zig’s counsel: “You can have everything in life you want if you’ll just help enough people get what they want.”
Don’t worry about increasing your Klout score (or twittergrader ranking or whatever comes next). Just use whatever gifts you have to help other people accomplish their dreams. If you’ll help enough other people get what they want, you’ll have all the influence you’ll need.
Trey Pennington