Google+ Now Impacting Klout Scores, Active Users See Scores Go Up

Love it or hate it, but Klout is one of the key players in today’s influence/reputation market. Even if the whole concept of ranking people based on popularity feels a little icky to you (I feel you), the startup has the potential to form the basis of something bigger, something less spammy, and something less easily gamed by “social media marketers.” Or so we hope.

In the meantime, for those of you who care about this sort of thing: hooray, your score just went up today thanks to Google+!

Although people have been able to add Google+ to their Klout profiles since September, the company announced today that Google+ is now directly impacting Klout scores.

The service has begun measuring the influence for users who have already connected their Google+ accounts to Klout and, of those, 62% are considered “active” users of the social network. For these active users, their Klout scores should have increased based on the popularity of their public Google+ posts.

Those who have added Google+ but are not active on the network will not see a drop, however. In other words, there’s no penalty for not using Google+, which seems fair, given that the network’s true influence and importance is still debatable.

After calculating the score changes, the median score change for active G+ connected users is 0.4742 and the mean score change is 2.1577. Klout notes that some people who really embraced Google+ as a platform saw their score jump up as much as 40+ points. Users who are active on all three top social networks (Google+, Twitter and Facebook combined) will likely see smaller score increases as opposed to those who are only active on two of the three (i.e., Facebook and G+ or Twitter and G+). But for the most part, active Google+ users, who tend to have scores ranging from 30 to 60, will see a score increase of 2.177 today.