Article

Patrick Kitchell
Patrick Kitchell 13 February 2015

How To Inflate Your Klout Score

Klout shouldn't be used to measure how valuable a person on social media, read how I inflated my score from 40.

In 2012 right after summer vacation, I made a bet with a colleague that we should compete on our Klout Score.

 

Klout or www.klout.com is a social media scoring system that scores your likes, comments, retweets from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google + and many more. The score is a range from 0 to 100 and supposedly benchmarks how influential you are with the sphere of influence you have in the social media world.

 

We dove into this experience because we read an article about a company that hired one person over another for a job based on their Klout score and that sounded insane.

 

Google search: “Hiring Based on Klout” I am not a social media expert and the colleague is the marketing expert and was actually hired for his job off of twitter so I assumed he would know more about this subject than I did making me the underdog.

 

We decided to run our little competition from August 2012 to the end of the December 2012

 

My Strategy

 

My strategy evolved over time and I made the mistake to think that the more followers a person has on Facebook, Google + and Twitter the more interaction a person will have(retweets, likes, favorites, etc.) and from my standpoint at the time the higher my score will become.

 

Since, I despised Facebook for its pettiness of having to see mundane status updates or arguing politics this led me to Google’s social media networking platform Google + and finally a serious effort at twitter. I basically started to invite and follow anyone and everyone on these three platforms.

 

I also at the time did some of the following:

 

Bought Twitter Followers

 

True, I love to experiment and I think it is important to try these and other things to understand impact. I bought followers through twiends which is a site where a person buy “seeds” and then you offer seeds to people to follow you which in return they use for others to follow them( a viscous circle).

 

Why? I wanted to experiment with this and see what getting more followers will do for me if anything.

 

All, I will say is it is important to experiment to understand the negative outcomes this has on your twitter(or instagram) profile and the amount of time it takes to clean up the waste afterwards.

 

Used Auto Posting Tools

 

I made sure that where I posted that all other platforms received the same post. This made sure that content that I was pushing was spread far and wide across many venues with the minimum effort.

 

Abuse #Hashtags#

 

Sounds strange but twitter is full of people doing what I am doing, auto following people, auto retweeting by hashtag, auto retweeting other users randomly but with purposefulness.

 

I found at one time two “robots” that would auto tweet each other and these two “robots” would also auto tweet very specific #hashtags(can´t remember what they are right now).

 

I would load my tweets in the my robot(see below) and be sure that these hashtags were built into some tweets then they would retweet me and each other and therefore increasing my reach and affecting my score.

 

After doing this for awhile, I also found a twitter account that had over 1 million followers that would retweet on a certain #hashtag and I would experiment until I figure his trigger and gain more reach.

 

Purchased A Twitter Robot

 

Tweetadder was the one that I settled with and before twitter changed their API it was possible to auto follow and unfollow people based on keywords, location or even follow followers from another user.

 

Also tweetadder had auto tweeting function that would allow me to upload 5000 tweets and tweet them without me having to worry. Now since, I was spamming twitter because my goal was the gain favorites, retweets and followers on twitter I believe I did more harm to my score than I helped. More importantly my aggressive behavior on twitter had me banned two times.

 

Used Social Media Gaming Platform

 

I found a place called Empire Avenue. Empire Avenue is a stock market game where people purchase stock in you and you receive dividends from your social network connectivity and your stock being purchased. Empire Avenue is awesome at influencing scoring because one aspect of Empire Avenue is that you can set up missions. Missions are when you pay other people to retweet a tweet, visit a site and share its content, subscribe to YouTube pages.

 

Yes, you are hearing correct. People are being paid to increase other peoples social media interaction and top scores on Klout that are not famous use this tool.

 

Bulk Followed Circles On Google

 

I had up to a time before deleting my Google + account around 7000 followers and it was a strategy to circle big circles and let people follow me while either not returning the favor or constantly removing the “junk”.

 

After 4 Months -- What Did I Learn?

 

Needless to say, I spent a lot of time figuring these things out and after a few months of trying; I drove my klout score from around 40 to 72 and I won the bet by a good 10 points. I also believe that if I had kept at it this a little long then I would be able to get around 76 and hold it.

 

For starters the biggest thing I learned was the social media world is full of fake people and many people use social media just to keep up with the jones. Many top social media gurus are doing the same things mentioned above and might even be paying people to create content, post content and reply for them and then they reap the rewards. The amount of pictures and posts of absolute spam that I would promote with Empire Avenue to give people false interaction was amazing.

 

The Scoring stinks: Klout scoring is terrible, really, it means nothing.

 

Why I Am I Saying This? 

  • Think about this, I was able to manipulate the score and drive it up at least 15 points higher than I deserved. Also, some of those robots, I found on twitter that I would use to retweet me had higher klout scores than real people. All the top non famous with a score over 75 is doing the same. I know this is generalizing so I apologize ahead of time.
  • Kred was more interesting and only because their scoring system was more transparent and less secretive. Very hard to unfriend people on Facebook.
  • The effort and clicks it takes to remove people from Facebook was so painful, I ended up deleting my account and starting over. Your Facebook friends, the real ones, hate you for spamming them. Most people do not know how to work the security on Facebook and limit the their wall from posts and I guy like me that opens the flood gates of posts and pictures makes them unfriend me. Facebook was a complete a waste of time. My distaste for Facebook grew so much that was glad to delete it and start over with a select group of friends but at the end of the day, I deleted that account too and never came back to Facebook.
  • Google + was pretty cool but it was a vast wasteland. Irritating enough it was integrated with my GMAIL and Calendar and clogged not just my Google + wall but also my email and calendar. For the most part Google hangouts rock but I spent way to much time worrying about Google + without getting anything in return. Twitter is the Master.
  • Twitter is awesome, I mean this. The most interaction, the most meaningful interaction I had out of all my social media came from twitter and people willing to use 140 characters with me. Before I tried to drive up my Klout score; I knew very little about using twitter and to my surprise it has become my main tool.

Conclusion

 

Scoring interaction on social media through Klout and Kred serve no purpose. I would be very wary of person that promotes themselves because they have a high score. It maybe a benchmark but because it is easily manipulative it is very difficult to trust.

 

Originally posted here

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