Is Social Media Metrics A Good Thing?

Are social media metrics good? Klout, a company that claims to measure influence in social media, recently announced that it has updated the way it measures influence. My score went up. Fairly significantly.

I’d been hovering around the 32 mark in my Klout score, down from 36 a few months before. Today I discovered my Klout score is 46. And the strange thing is Klout acts like it’s been around the 46 mark for ages. My 30-page high, it tells me, is 45.7 (current score before rounding up) and my lowest is 43.74. Impressed?

I’m not.

For weeks now Klout has been telling me that I’m influential about three topics (Poems, Social Media, and iPad). I actually removed the iPad topic because I’ve only mentioned it once, if that, and it was probably a retweet. I actually consider myself influential on more than just poetry and social media. I’d like to add Literature, Writing and Publishing to that list, and Internet marketing. Last week I actually earned the right to add my own topics, but I haven’t been able to realize that yet.

While I wouldn’t dismiss Klout competely, I don’t hang on every word the service gives me. I linked Google+ to my account a couple of weeks ago and still have yet to see how it influences my Klout score. I’ve actually used Twitter much less since joining Google+, yet my Klout score went up.

Now that Google has integrated Google+ and Blogger, I may have to start using Blogger more for some things just to see what happens (Blogger is one of the services that Klout measures).

When it comes to online influence, I don’t think there’s any perfect measure. You can look at how many followers you have and know your influence. You can’t measure it by Likes or retweets. I’m fairly confident that if I added more followers to my accounts that I’d see an uptick in my Klout score, but I wouldn’t want to do that just for that cause.

Bottom line, Klout is a decent way to measure your social media influence, but I wouldn’t put a lot of stock into it. It doesn’t allow you to measure multiple Twitter accounts, but you can add your Facebook profile and your Facebook pages. Seems a bit lopsided to me.

When it comes to social media influence, your best bet is just to focus on doing. Metrics is only good if you can act on them.