I just read a post on Mashable.com about how Klout does not really measure influence. I’m now more into local internet marketing and gave up caring about my Klout score a while ago, when I learned how easily the system could be gamed.
Once I figured out how to game it I lost interest and let my Klout Score drop.
If I was evil I would have a closet full of Klout perks, but that’s not my style. So I’m not writing this to encourage you to start gaming Klout so you can get free stuff. I just knew the title would be too irresistible and you would just have to take a peek at this article. I also know that you are reading this article not cause you wanted to learn how to hack your Klout Score to get free stuff, but because you were shocked that your Klout Score could be easily manipulated.
Let’s start at the beginning…
I wrote about how to raise your Klout Score a while back and understanding this is the basis for hacking your Klout Score. All of this is pretty easy to set up once you have the right tools but it can be time consuming especially if you get addicted and slip to the dark side.
How The Klout Score Works
Here are a few other things that determine your Klout Score:
- Follower to follow Twitter ratio
- How many people with high Klout scores follow you
- How many people with high Klout scores retweet and at mention you
Now That You Know Here Is How You Use It To Hack Your Klout Score
Create 5 Twitter Accounts
I had made a bunch of Twitter accounts for testing things a while back and so when I learned about Klout I was curious to see if using them to retweet, @mention me and spread my Tweets would raise my Klout Score and guess what, it did.
So make a few Twitter accounts and use TweetAdder.com to manage them. Load the accounts up with Tweets and set them to Tweet about four Tweets a day. Then set them up to retweet and @message you every 3 or 4 Tweets (depending on how often you Tweet). This is all I did and it shot my Klout Score up to about 59 opening me up to receive all sorts of cool perks.
There Is More
If you really wanted to go to town there is more that you can do because you can use these Twitter accounts to sign up to many other social media sites and then engage with yourself there. This my friends is deep on the dark side and once you go here I believe subconsciously you unlock a spam badge and this is the beginning of the end for you.
Plus +K
You can even sign these new Twitter accounts up to Klout and give yourself +K for whatever you want to be an influential in. The fact that you can even give people +K is pretty silly to me. This is like giving you the cheat code to the Klout game. We need to simply turn to the Klout Bomb to see how great +K is at determining true influence on a topic.
A perfect example of this is Rick Santorum who is now according to Klout’s +Ks is the foremost expert on “homophobia” and a slew of other topics. Why? People who disagree with his views decided to Klout Bomb him and give him +Ks for a bunch of strange topics.
He might be an expert on “diapers” but who knows, the point is that you can Klout bomb yourself as well. If you built 5 Twitter accounts, it is easy to build 30, once you have a system to organize it. It is a lot of work, but I’ve seen people apply themselves to less nobler causes.
Klout Is Also Always Evolving
Klout’s website say’s:
“The social web is changing every day and the Klout Score will continue to evolve and improve. The best strategy for obtaining a high Klout Score is to simply create great content that your network wants to share and engage with.”
Klout is always upgrading their algorithms to prevent you from gaming the system. My point is that this is very important and I hope this post shows them their need to keep tweaking and upgrading constantly.
I know the team at Klout is working really hard because trying to measure social influence is not an easy task. But they owe it to their advertisers, users, and people who are using them for social media marketing to figure this out.
What I really love about social media is that it gives us the unique ability to actually help companies tweak their products. This helps you play an active role in the evolution of products like Klout that are exploring new territory in social media.
Please only use this information for good and not for a good time at Klout’s expense.