Klout Adds Expertise Badges To Its Influence Rankings

Klout isn’t just about influence anymore. The social media ranking service today announced it has added expertise to the mix of factors that make up a Klout score.

Now Klout profiles will display expertise badges for users who rank highly for knowledge in the 10,000 topics that Klout is tracking.

Social media and digital marketing experts will no doubt be happy with the new set of vanity badges, but Klout believes the extra information will be most useful for people trying to sift through the online information glut and find more relevant and trustworthy accounts to follow on social media. And marketers, Klout believes, can use the information to see a clearer picture of who they’re engaging with and who their customers are and to identify and enlist relevant experts on behalf of their brand.

“We are making it dramatically easier for people to make personal decisions based on the right context and a higher degree of trust,” said Rob Tarkoff, president and CEO of Lithium, Klout’s parent company, in a release. “The digital universe now has so much information that it can be overwhelming to sift through the noise to make it useful. Until today, all of us had to make intuitive guesses regarding whose random post, comment, or perspective to trust. Our improvements to Klout remove that guesswork and quickly surface the expertise of more than 600 million people or brands with a Klout score.”

To determine topical expertise, Klout analyzes the social content an account produces for the previous 90 days. It parses the content using natural language processing and then using machine learning algorithms determines how authoritative and engaging the information is. Badges are displayed on accounts that rank in the top percentiles for a given topic.

Klout has also created topic pages that display the top 10 ranked sources and recent social posts from experts in specific subjects.

Klout also announced today that Klout’s core service will be made available in four new languages — Arabic, French, German and Spanish — by the end of May. And in the coming months the company will roll out topic expertise and topic pages for those languages.