Klout Is Now a Content Marketing Tool

klout

klout

Klout has yet again updated and changed things around a bit. This time, however, the changes are more than just cosmetic. Klout’s new dashboard lists Web content that users may be interested in. Users can share this content via Facebook or Twitter and even schedule the content to be shared at a specific time, similar to Buffer. The biggest difference between scheduling posts on Klout and Buffer, though, is that on Klout you can only share the content you find on your dashboard; you cannot share your own content.

Klout Dashboard

This change pulls Klout in the direction of being a content curation and marketing tool. Prior to this change, Klout was primarily a measure of online social influence with other small features such as perks, user-added and -answered questions and achievement badges.

It’s interesting to see that with this update Klout has effectively hidden your Klout community away for the time being. While the old Klout dashboard made a point of displaying your online influencers and their Klout scores along with the topics they had a lot of Klout for, now when you log into Klout, the focus is all on you. Though you can still give Klout to others by searching for them on your profile screen (accessible by clicking on your profile photo/klout score), it now takes a lot more effort to so much as find the people that you wish to give +K to. I can’t help but wonder if that feature will disappear altogether some time in the near future.

Klout Search

Once you’ve located and shared content via Klout, you can go to the Measure area to view both your social network activity and the engagement levels on the content you’ve published via Klout. At least that is the plan, anyway; as of now, the analytics features on shared content is not functioning.

Klout Measure

Overall I would say that now Klout feels like an entirely different pair of shoes. By bringing content to your attention and encouraging you to share it, Klout is giving people a real reason to come to the site and log in from time to time. The update feels a bit limiting, though. Why does Klout limit you to sharing only to Facebook and Twitter, especially when your overall Klout score takes into account engagement data from a wide selection of social networks? Though the scheduling feature allows Klout to compete with other scheduling services like Buffer and Hootsuite for the first time, only allowing users to share to Facebook and Twitter puts Klout at a disadvantage. In spite of this limitation, however, Klout does have the edge in content curation specifically because it curates interesting Web content for users.

What are your thoughts? Have you tried the new Klout? Will this latest makeover be enough to push Klout to the forefront of social media marketing tools?

Photo by Steve Hall
via Search Engine Journal

Rishona Campbell

By Rishona Campbell

Rishona has been blogging since the '90s and is now a social media evangelist. She has an MBA in Marketing has the daily goal to leave the world a little better place than how she found it.