Move Over Klout by Jennifer Hudson Taylor

Have you tried Klout? It's an online service where you give it access to all your social media accounts  and it tallies up your performance at socializing and how much influence you have on others, then it rates you in comparison to others who have signed up for the service. It's absolutely FREE.

However, it does have it's criticisms, such as the company’s privacy, transparency, and how it formulates its comparisons. I'm on Klout and to be honest, I'm not sure if it is a true measurement. My scores consistently range from 50-75. At the height of my book launch campaign, I was charting 75, but the highest rank one can get is 100. It doesn't seem to be able to differentiate daily Klout measurements verses and active online campaigns, which will obviously spike a person's score. After the campaign, it seems like you fall off a cliff. Other iffy comparisons is how someone like me could have as high a score as a celebrity or brand name companies who have a much higher influence status?. Thus, are some reasons for a few new competitors who are trying to take the measurement scale a little further, and ultimately, to more accuracy.

This past fall, Kred launched and focuses on analytics and marketing tools for brands. The company pays top dollar for unique access to Twitter's tweets. It synthesizes and sorts them in communities of interests. Klout uses a method of sorting influencers by topics. While it assigns people an influence score like Klout, each point is traceable to the tweet that earned it. This is a new feature that Klout doesn't provide. Right now Klout only tells you have may retweets you received over the last 90 days, but you have no way of being able to determine which tweets were retweeted the most and when.


Another alternative is PROskore, which appears more professional as it measures influence beyond social media, such as past job titles, education, and experiences.

Have you tried any of these platform measurement tools? What are your thoughts? Do you feel something like this would be helpful to determine if you're on the right right track with your platform building goals?