Klouts New Ranking Alogrithm
Posted in Social Media on 26th October 2011

So, one of the biggest stories of today, especially in the world of social media was the introduction of a new ranking algorithm from Klout. It's ruffled many feathers, I would even go as far to say mine. As some of my tweets may suggest. This new ranking system is supposed to provide Klout users with a more accurate and transparent ranking system. Admittedly I can’t comment on whether they are more accurate. But the reaction across many social networks is anything but a transparent scoring system. Many people are reporting drops in scores and some quite substantial drops. We ourselves found ourselves at an 11 point score drop (Down to 24) and frankly over the past few weeks have been struggling to maintain the good ground we had when we started using Klout. Others are quoting even bigger losses, above double that of ours. I’ve read several posts on the matter and the backlash of the new scoring system to try and gauge the general effect.

Klout state that “A majority of users will see their Scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop.”

Currently a lot of people in our field “SEO + Social Media + Web Development” are reporting losses, unfortunately people in these fields are much more concerned with their social worth than others, who may not even know of its existence. So it comes as no surprise to the negativity Klout is receiving.

Here are some extracts from Klout’s blog, Timothy states

“Very unhappy with this change. My score went from 73 down to 53. 20 point drop. I've been working for months to increase my Klout score. Please fix this.”

This was liked by 130 people. I am keen to point out that the chart shown on Klout’s very own blog about the change only goes as far to suggest that users will lose 15 points at a maximum. The graph also seems to suggest that the majority of people’s score will increase. Which I don’t agree with at all, so far of all the accounts I am familiar with as either mine, operated by me, or friends and colleagues, they have all gone down. For people involved in this kind of industry and actively try to increase their Klout score it’s quite a damming blow and the natural human response is to have social worth, so to be suddenly demoted in worth is quite a harsh blow, no matter how much you don’t want to admit it. What aggravates me is that I have tweeted somewhere around 1600 tweets about SEO, social media, web design, web development and the like (admittedly, many of these tweets are not unique, i re-use good articles or resources as we all do). But I’m classed as a casual/listener, the actual description denotes me to a newbie tweeter and how i’ll be moving up soon. Reality is I probably haven’t stopped falling yet. I look at my brother, who has barely 50 tweets and doesn’t get twitter at all, a massive (Not actually massive) score of 34 (Not that he actually knows about this). He’s defined as the social hub, people come to him regarding what’s happening. They really don’t do this. This compared with my account that tweets in several RSS feeds from very well respected people in the industry like Mashable, Google, SEOMoz, Search engine land. I understand how Klout works and what its principle ranking algorithm is, but I disagree with the algorithm as a whole. It makes little effort to take into account the variance in how different groups use tweets in their timeline. Some people who use this Twitter as a social tool retweet and tweet a lot, often people who use it for a more marketing approach don’t retweet, because the information isn’t necessarily funny or outlandish like social tweeters, it’s concise, precise information, maybe a tip about Apache web servers, an SEO tip, a good book recommendation, a newly written blog about some other form of SEO, it’s a snippet of information, you take in and digest and move on. Obviously people do retweet information in our or similar fields, but it doesn’t seem to be a high priority, mainly because you have your own marketing to be doing. Obviously industry experts are often referenced.

Another comment I was keen to point out was Eric’s

This is very interesting. My score dropped about 16 points overnight. If that's because of a new algorithm, then fine. However, it does not make any sense whatsoever that my score now shows a steady decline in the past 30 days when it was showing a steady or improving score the past 30 days with the old scoring system.

A little disheartening too know I have worked very hard to tweet engaging, relevant content at least once per hour throughout the day and force myself to use Google+ and Facebook to improve my score. I can't believe I bought in to this ridiculous measurement of "influence."

I guess that overall I feel very much like Eric, it appears that I am not the only one either. Anyway, my final thoughts are this, much as my natural reaction is to be disheartened by a considerable points drop I have to remind myself that much as I would have preferred my Klout score to explode, I always found it a novelty API, it tries to provide to some kind rank to a nearly impossible social phenomena that if it were actually, accurately, rankable, would mean that SkyNet had taken over the world. Don’t lose any sleep over it people / tweeps!

PS – I did request that Klout delete my account