Klout vs. Kred

VS

There are a lot of opinions going around about what social media scoring system is better. Is it Klout or Kred?

Before I go into too much information on that, I will briefly talk about both.
Now I have written numerous posts about Klout. In fact I just wrote an ebook about Klout called The Secret to High Social Media Rankings: How to Get Klout and it is finally available on Kindle. Not to mention my big product The Klout Supremacy is out even though I am still dealing with a few techie glitches with it (hold off on purchasing for now, I will let you know when it is fully ready). So I have written tonnes of stuff on Klout already. But I will summarize briefly on some areas that I may not have covered.

Klout

As you know, Klout is a social media scoring system that awards a user a score from 0-100 based on his or her social activity. The higher the score, the more influential that individual is online. I have always believed what someone does online spills over to their offline world.

Klout was established in late 2008 and between then and now, it has gone through many bumps along the way like any new business would. Since their last algorithm change in August 2012, it has made some massive improvements. The score is based on 400 signals from 7 various networks and are processed on a daily basis in order to generate a score. What is included in that are Facebook likes, comments, mentions subscribers, wall posts, and friends. Also included are Twitter mentions, retweets, how many lists you are part of, followers, as well as replies. Google+ is incorporated into the mix and what is looked at are comments, +1s, as well as reshares. Also LinkedIn titles, connections, recommendations and comments count for something. Even Klout?s own +K received is looked at and Foursquare tips. What was introduced back in August were the importance of Wikipedia pages, inlinks to outlinks ratio, the amount inlinks the page has. All of that calculates a score out of one hundred and your three top influential topics are shown on your profile (what you have received the most +Ks for). I don’t have any Wikipedia pages (not yet anyway) but I do have a score of 77/100. I am extremely active and engaging on my Facebook, Twitter and G+ pages. I have a pretty good LinkedIn title (though for some reason Klout is having difficulty hooking it up to my profile as they are looking into this).

Klout was criticized for the longest time about not being transparent about how a score is generated. But now, it is quite transparent about what activities you have done in it’s moment’s section. It shows you what tweet, Facebook post, Google + post had the most interaction and how it contributes to your score for that day. Klout has also been doing its best to squash gamers as well as improving privacy issues. It is still quite disorganized as far as not being prepared for crashes (like back about 6 weeks ago when their Facebook connector failed and people’s scores were dropping substantially). However, I believe Klout has come a long way in a short period of time. Klout also offers perks and freebies to those who have scores at a certain level and who are influential in certain areas (if they have many +Ks which are votes in an area of influence). The best perks and freebies are available in the US but it appears Canadians are starting to get some good ones like one I received from Cadillac Canada the other day to test drive a car! Lets see how that one goes! Now I will talk a little about Kred.

Kred

I don’t believe I ever really elaborated too much on Kred before. Kred is a competitor of Klout and was established in 2011. However, their scoring system is different as it measures two things which are someone’s influence (how many mentions, retweets, etc) he or she receives as well as his or her outreach (how many times the user retweets and mentions someone else). The influence score is measured out of 1000 and the outreach score is measured out of 10. The higher your influence score (mine is currently 832 in the Global community), the more influential you are online. The higher your outreach score (mine is currently 8), the more generous you appear to be. It measures your social activity from Twitter and Facebook if you hook it up to your Kred profile.

Kred also takes into account your offline accomplishments such as degrees and certificates you may have achieved. You just need to fax those to Kred directly and it will have a positive impact on your score.

Kred is extremely transparent as it shows you every tweet, retweet, Facebook like, mention, etc and indicates how they have contributed to your Kred score.

However, instead of having topics of influence like you do with Klout, you have individual scores in different communities. You even have a score in communities that you have nothing to do with like I do in Sports (currently mine is 344/5 and not even sure how mine ended up that high since I never talk about sports of any kind). Kred also has its own rewards from brands like Klout (similar to its perks) and awards these rewards to the most influential users in a particular community (like Klout does when it comes to rewarding perks to influential users in a particular topic with a certain score).

Who Wins? Kred or Klout?

The interesting thing is I have read so many blog posts talking about whether Klout is better than Kred or vise versa. So many people believe that Kred is better than Klout (mostly because Klout has had a long history of not being transparent and seems to be more buggy than Kred).

Well this is my take on it. I really do like Kred and feel it has some better features than Klout such as not only measuring influence but also your outreach- and how Kred also looks at your offline achievements which is a big thing. But to be frank, if I were to vote, I will have to say that Klout wins. I will explain why.

Firstly, Klout is the pioneer when it comes to social scoring. Not only was it one time a new company but it was a brand new platform that no one has ever come up with. Of course when something is so new like that, it will go through growing pains, twists and turns and obstacles will be faced. I do think they are a bit too old school in many ways still ( for instance, I think they should have added Facebook Fan pages in their platform a long time ago) but eventually they will start adding more like Google Plus pages (Kred does not even look at Google Plus yet either).

But Kred just came along. I mean again I believe their scoring methods are quite good but so many people feel that Kred has been better organized than Klout. How do they know that those who established Kred did not do their research on what Klout did in the past which had created a lot of trouble for them? In other words I feel it is unfair to say that Kred runs better than Klout. It very well may have had an advantage to learn about the pitfalls that Klout experienced while it was still new.

But more importantly, I vote for Klout for two main reasons.

1. It is simple compared to Kred. When you go into Klout’s dashboard, you will see a pie graph and it will show how much of your activity contributes to your score percentage wise (ie, Facebook makes up 62{a0065375a7e2d1c093abc1aba7894b1ad713a40df7f413d8a34d916c8e570350} of your score, Twitter makes up 38{a0065375a7e2d1c093abc1aba7894b1ad713a40df7f413d8a34d916c8e570350} of your score, Google Plus makes up 20{a0065375a7e2d1c093abc1aba7894b1ad713a40df7f413d8a34d916c8e570350} of your score, Klout makes up 10{a0065375a7e2d1c093abc1aba7894b1ad713a40df7f413d8a34d916c8e570350} and LinkedIn makes up 10{a0065375a7e2d1c093abc1aba7894b1ad713a40df7f413d8a34d916c8e570350} etc). Then you will see your specific moments that contribute to your score’s calculation for that day such as an interactive moment from Twitter or Facebook, Google Plus, etc.

When you log into the Kred dashboard, your “Kred Story” which are like your moments on Klout is literally scattered everywhere and is confusing. You are flooded with every tweet or Facebook moment and it is quite overwhelming. It is also quite difficult to navigate through the dashboard I have found. This is a huge deal. Because Klout’s dashboard is neat and clean, and Kred’s is scattered and overwhelming makes me appreciate Klout’s simplicity. I realize that Kred’s intention is to be as transparent as possible but I am sorry- it has gotten to a point that I cannot spend too much time in their dashboard because it is too confusing.

2. I do not like the fact that you have a score for “communities” in Kred that don’t even apply to you. The fact that you have so many communities instead of topics of influence is just not necessary. I don’t like this aspect of Kred. I realize that Klout would give you a topic of influence that may not apply to you if you had mentioned it a few times on your social networks (ie saying over and over again you are tired and feel like a zombie and all of a sudden Klout believes you are influential in “zombies” and gives you that as a topic of influence). But here is the thing. You can remove topics in Klout that do not apply to you. You can also add topics that you believe you are influential in and receive +K’s in those from others. Therefore you can be seen as influential in topics that you truly are influential in. Those topics that you are not influential will not be a part of you at all. This is the big mistake that Kred makes. If you are not influential in a topic like I am not at all when it comes to Sports, why be given a score for that??? So I feel in areas like that, Kred needs to do some cleaning up.

I feel I have said enough, so even though I do like Kred, Klout is still a winner in my eyes.