After announcing its C round of funding last January 3, Klout revealed that the raised amount will be a resource for its future initiative. As CEO Joe Fernandez told Mashable, “The money is going to be used to really drive accuracy, transparency and utility. We want to measure influence every place it exists and make sure Klout users are recognized for their influence every place they go.”
What’s in Store for Klout this 2012
According to Klout’s official blog, the undisclosed amount that was raised under the supervision of Kleiner Perkins will help them empower every user to reveal the scope of their influence. In fact, the social analytics website will invest more on their infrastructure and engineering areas to provide the most accurate and transparent influence metrics. Additionally, they’ll improve their Topics and Klout Perks platform to help their members use social media better.
Klout’s Topics feature, which was released last September 2011, recently got a visual update in the form of sashes. This feature lets users see who are the top influencers and +K recipients of a particular topic. The Klout Perks, meanwhile, rewards users with a social media access on selected brand pages depending on their Klout score.
Other than these features, Klout is also building a scoring system for YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Last.fm and Flickr. The social analytics website is also planning to add Quora, Yelp, Posterous, Livefyre, Disqus, Bit.ly and other services to their system. That being said, these updates will give users more reasons they should use Klout.
Going Mobile
With improving its existing features now on the horizon, the initiative could also mean that a mobile component is in the works. This move makes great sense since Klout don’t have an official mobile app as of the moment. And when asked last Tuesday, Joe Fernandez hinted that a mobile component is definitely part of their future plans. If this pushes through, users will have more ways of garnering Klout scores.
Despite being far from perfect, Klout scores are still simple to understand. In fact, it is considered by marketers whenever they want to reach their brand’s influencers. There’s also a growing demand of data through Application Programming Interface (API) calls, since it’s the developers’ way of integrating Klouts scores with their services.
With the number of updates and features added to Klout, the social analytics website definitely had a great 2011. Hence, this year can bring them to new heights.