In an official statement released earlier this week the CEO of Klout, Joe Fernandez said that the changes are incorporated in order to help Klout’s users evolve as “better content creators”.  Thus, Klout has introduced the “create, share and schedule” features in the new design. Validating the need for changes Fernandez mentioned that “sharing articles was a natural place for us (Klout) to start with, since (content) curation is such a huge part of what most active social users do on a daily basis.”

Let’s take a close look at some of the new features in Klout that you’ll find once you log in.

‘Create’ Tab – What is it?

The most prominent feature in the new look Klout is the ‘create’ tab. It looks like a ‘social reader’ with a continuous feed of fitting stories that will match your audience’s (those who follow you on Klout) favourite topics. However, the catch is “instead of making recommendations for the users, this functionality will find and identify content for followers to consume.” So you’ll be creating and sharing stories that falls within the favourite topic categories of your followers and hence draw more engagement.

You will have the option to add new topics in order to find a great stock of content to create and share with your followers on Facebook and Twitter. The more your shared stories are re-shared and retweeted your Klout Score will increase. Remember “it’s not just about the quantity of content you create and share but the quality (relevancy) of it that will matter in the calculation of your Klout Score” an industry insider remarked.

Another feature of the content (topic) feed is that you’ll notice a small ‘thumbs up’ icon below each thumbnail image of the story link. Clicking on it will signal the Klout engine to show you more stories like the one above (see circled image above). In a word you can ‘curate’ the content (articles) that you wish to share with your Klout followers. The more you share quality stuff, and the more your followers get to re-share your content, you will build up authority on Klout and hence improve your (or your brand’s) social media presence.

How to ‘Share’ on Klout

Next up is the ’Share’ feature that users will find extremely handy. Here’s a quick overview on how you can use this feature on Klout. Once you find stories listed under the create tab, you can see a bright red ‘share’ button on the right side of your screen beside each story. Clicking on it will open another window with the share options.

Now you can either ‘share’ right at the moment you see it or you can schedule this update for posting on your selected social media account (currently Klout is allowing to share only on Facebook and Twitter) at your pre-fixed time. If you want to schedule your post, click on the schedule button; a scheduler box will open.

You can select time, day, month and year from the scheduler and publish your content in the selected time on your Twitter or Facebook profile. You’ll get to see a confirmation on your screen after the post has been scheduled.

Marketers can take advantage of this feature by scheduling the content of their client’s Klout page as per the time zone of their followers from targeted time zones. Coupled with an Analytics (see screenshot below), a marketer can now keep a track of the Facebook and Twitter performance of their clients from Klout itself and gauge their social presence.

A higher Klout score translates into a bigger and better social media presence for any person or a brand. With the ‘Klout Analytics’ feature now included, Klout will surely throw a big challenge to other hugely popular social media monitoring and measurement tools like HootSuite, SocialOomph, Seismic and TweetDeck in the coming days.

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