Although Klout describes itself as “the standard for influence,” the startup has focused its measurements thus far on assessing people’s Twitter influence. But today, Klout has added another measurement to the mix, giving users the ability to gauge their Facebook influence.
As Ash Rust, Ranking Director at Klout, noted in the company’s blog post announcing today’s change, sharing and interaction on Facebook is different than that on Twitter. While Twitter influence can be see by the amount of interest and engagement from tweets (and retweets), Facebook users “post many different types of content, view multiple streams and interact with their friends in more complex ways.”
For Klout users that link their Facebook accounts to the service, their Klout Report will note include Facebook data. And their Klout score will increase based on comments, likes, unique commenters, and unique likers.
Klout says this will make your Klout score more accurate. But in some ways, it’s hard to compare the sorts of networks people cultivate via Twitter and those made via Facebook. While it might be relatively simple to get a fair number of your high school graduating class to click through a link to the latest amusing Muppets video, you might not have the same sort of sway on Twitter. For many people, these two social networks are still divided between the professional and the personal.
Currently, Klout only assesses your personal Facebook account. For those who operate pages for their businesses or organizations, the score will not look at that information in order to judge reach and influence.
