Klout’s Social Media Influence Score Encourages Anti-Social Behavior
There’s been many a blog post discussing the “vacation effect” on Klout scores – see Twitter, Klout and the Vacation Effect & 5 Tips for Keeping up Your Klout Score Without Ruining Your Family Vacation. However, vacations aren’t the only reason individuals may take a social media hiatus. Every summer thousands of reserve component soldiers from around the country fulfill their annual training requirement of two to three weeks of training all over the world (myself included). This year I decided to use the opportunity to create a mini-case study on the effects of spotty social media use over that time on my own Klout score. Here’s what I discovered. . .
Expectedly, my Klout score fell dramatically – four points. Unexpectedly, it held steady for nearly two weeks. Social media activity went from an average of 14 tweets per day down to two, two Facebook posts per day to one half posts per day, and one LinkedIn post per day to zero. The lack of social media activity caused the decline in my Klout score.
Preventing the Klout “Vacation Effect”
It’s quite simple to negate the Klout vacation effect – don’t stop using social media. This begs the question – If someone is always on social media aren’t they really being anti-social? In fact, this anti-social behavior is encouraged by Klout. Klout actually rewards social media addicts and social-mediaholics with a higher algorithmic score.
Social Media Addiction and Its Anti-Social Behavior
Many of these addicts would say that engaging in social media IS social behavior. This may be true for the normal social media user, but not for social media addicts. Have you ever seen a large group of social media aficionados at a tweetup or networking event? What are they doing? They’re tweeting on their phones most of the time while confronted by real people in real spaces. This is very much anti-social behavior and many professionals would consider it rude. In fact, social media professionals which fall into this category have probably lost many off-line opportunities due to this anti-social behavior.
Klout is a fun tool to play around with and it’s good for discovering influencers, but don’t let it suck you into its score chasing anti-social behavior snare. Social media is a content distribution system which encourages conversation not an all-encompassing life trap. For help with Twitter download our Twitter Marketing Cheat Sheet.
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