Does Your Dance Studio Business Have Klout?

photo credit: klout.com

This is a guest blog post from our PR Intern, Jordon Cloud.

The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure your: True Reach, Amplification, and Network Impact (more on these later).

There has been a lot of discussion within the world of social media regarding some major changes to the algorithm that Klout uses to determine each users degree of online influence. Some of us who are active with social media became aware of a change on Klout.com as soon as it happened, while others may have picked up on the hot topic for the first time after the discussion began. Unfortunately, the change caused a decrease in score for many users, which prompted many people to respond with outrage. Although measuring and predicting social media influence is a relatively new idea, Klout is respected as one of the top websites to visit in order to find out a “social media score.” However, many users feel that these changes go against the degree of engagement that Klout once encouraged. While it is still up for debate how much the score really means, the website has changed enough to help us understand more about our influence online.

Klout has not yet come out to describe the new PeopleRank algorithm piece by piece, but many bloggers and social media gurus have been speculating about the major changes that have been made. It seems as though this new way of measuring social media influence focuses less on content creation and more on the value of the content. This means that you can tweet as much as you’d like but if nobody is retweeting or responding to you then you will see no significant change in your score. Similarly, if the people who are engaging with your content have small followings, your score will not increase as much as it would if a highly influential social media user was responding.

One positive aspect of the change is the way that the website provides us with a day-by-day breakdown of our scores. If you see a major decrease in your score it is easy to check the date and relate the drop to a lack of response to your tweets. This allows users to dig deeper into what it is that their audience relates and responds to. Find out if your score has increased by checking out the dot graphs on your Klout score homepage. Hover over each dot on the graph to discover the date affiliated with the score and refer to your social media accounts to notice any changes in your use.

So, what does all this mean for my dance business?

In a business that is so centered on education and experience in the field, let’s hope that our clients never ever choose us based on our Klout scores! While this will probably never happen with our students or their families, other clients may take a look at your online influence before deciding to donate money or pursue advertising. It is important that investors like these have a good understanding as to how many people your content can reach. Klout provides users with important information based on day-to-day calculations regarding categories including true reach, amplification, and network. Each of these categories have their own specific number that affiliates with it.

Let’s break down each of these categories in terms of social media and dance:

True reach: This number tells you how many people you influence. This includes the number of people who follow you as well as how many people they follow. Other terms of engagement are also factored into true reach.

Amplification: Without amplification, we are simply spewing out information that nobody is interested in. This number helps us understand how much our content is being shared and responded to. If people often engage in your content, you will have a high amplification score.

Network: This number seems to combine true reach and amplification and answers the question as to how many people are engaging and how often.

After making these changes, Klout posted this statement on their blog:

“We’re looking at how many people you influence, how much you influence them, and how influential they are. We don’t care where that influence happens. We just care that it’s happening”.

From this we can understand that based on this algorithm it doesn’t matter what social networking sites you’re using. In the coming months it is likely that many more social networking sites will be available to connect to your Klout account. It is equally important that you’re influential on popular sites such as Twitter and Facebook as it is to be influential on Instagram or Foursquare. Having a larger and more engaged network will improve your Klout score no matter what website you are influential on.

photo credit: © Royalty-Free/Corbis

Based on Klout’s official topic page for “dance” it is easy to see that it is not especially important to have the highest Klout score in order to be influential within the online world of dance. Dance is a relatively small niche in the world of social media, so based on the new scoring system, it is not likely that your score will be as high as celebrities who are more involved in mainstream media. (Justin Bieber has a perfect score of 100!) Many of the highest scoring dancers are in fact celebrities in their own right. Most of these high scorers have performed on popular televisions shows like “So You Think You Can Dance” or “Dancing With the Stars” or they’re touring with musicians such as Beyonce or Britney Spears.

If you haven’t already, it would be a great idea to sign up and take a look at your Klout score. Make your own decision as to how much this number really means to your business, but do your best to learn what you can from the numbers provided. Klout is a free and useful website to track your online influence, so why not use it?

Have you used Klout? Did you know about Klout before reading this blog post? Do you think it’s useful for dance studio businesses? Please leave a comment below.

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This is a guest blog post by Jordon Cloud, PR Intern at Kiner Enterprises Inc. You can check out her blog at, http://socialrhythms.wordpress.com.