What was once a simple influence measurement site has become much more influential itself over the past few days after forming an alliance with Bing. Now Klout scores are adding a new dimension to people's searches on the search engine as part of a package of measures designed to make Bing a better place to build up a profile.
“Search is one of the most common ways that information about you is discovered by other people. Snapshots on Bing enable anyone who signs up on Klout to verify and manage how they appear in Bing search results, based on their public social network profiles,” a Klout spokesperson said in the site’s blog.
Snapshots are designed to make it quick and easy to find information about a person or a particular subject. When a user searches for someone who is on Klout, Bing will bring up that person’s Klout score, which is a number based on the amount of attention that is paid to their social media interactions and the type of people who pay them attention.
It will show which topics Klout considers them to be influential on and which social networks they have linked to. It will also display their public LinkedIn summary and two of the most influential moments from their Twitter and Instagram histories, chosen from a selection that they will have had the opportunity to review in order to avoid any potential embarrassment.
The advantage of this relationship to Bing is that it will enable the search engine to encapsulate useful information about ordinary people much as it does information about celebrities. The advantage to business people is that it will make it easier for them to raise their own public profiles and connect the different types of work they do. For instance, a man who achieves personal popularity on Instagram or becomes known as an expert in a particular area of discussion on Twitter can have this directly connected to a LinkedIn profile focused on business, helping in turn to direct people to a website or directly to stores.
Anybody who has both a LinkedIn account and a Klout account can start building a Snapshot after connecting the two. Snapshots are also useful as they make it easier to clarify who’s who when several people have the same name by bringing together several social profiles.
For more information on how to build up personal profiles and connect them to business activity, call Xcellimark.
