Since the birth of influencer marketing, brands, businesses and experts have been in search of a way to measure influence and effectiveness of social media activity. Klout was useful, even though it was often vilified. Detractors said it was too easy to game it, and that the scores bore little resemblance to real-world situations. However, it did measure people’s ability to attract attention on social media.

One alternative to help experts to self-assess their influence is Kred. But what do you need to know?

Kred uses two main measures to provide a score: influence and outreach

Kred describes these two as reflecting trust and generosity. Influence describes how much your social media activity—largely Twitter, although Facebook can also be linked—is retweeted, followed, or gets a reply. It is basically a measure of how much effect you have on what others do. You get influence points every time someone interacts with you or content you have posted. Outreach measures what Kred describes as your ‘generosity’, or how much you retweet, reply to or follow others. These two aspects are scored separately.

Kred is completely transparent in how it assesses influence and outreach

One of the criticisms of Klout was that it was difficult to see how the scores were developed. Kred, however, is completely transparent. It has a clear scale of how activities such as following or being followed translate to points, and how points translate to score. These include the effect of posting links, and having those links retweeted or shared. Kred is also realistic that not all users are equal, giving more points for content shared by social media accounts with more followers.

Other people can give you points using +Kred

When someone gives you +Kred, you receive 70 influence points. To put this into context, you receive 10 points for a comment or retweet of a link. This is therefore very valuable, and allows other people to show that they believe you are influential. However, there is a sting in the tail: each user who gives +Kred also receives outreach points for themselves—so there is a big incentive to simply keep giving +Kred without justification to boost your own outreach score.

Kred sorts people into communities, allowing an assessment of expert influence on a particular subject

One issue with Klout was that it was a single universal score for everyone on social media. It was, therefore, unsurprising that people like Justin Bieber and Barack Obama received the highest scores. Kred, however, recognises that people may be very influential in their field, but not more widely. It therefore sorts users into communities based on their activity, and particularly hashtags in posts and bios. You can therefore assess how influential you are within your community, and not simply across the whole of social media.

Kred provides an option to link all your content through a single domain using Link.Kred

Link.Kred will share all your most important (influential) content on a single domain, which it describes as ‘your own branded link’. You can therefore include this link in your bio on any social media site, and ensure that your followers can find you everywhere. You can also link to your blogs, a personal website, or other sites such as Medium. This gives a much more holistic picture of your activity.

Kred allows you to rank your contacts by influence

Via Link.Kred, Kred brings together your contacts from various platforms to enable you to manage, analyse and showcase them. You can, for example, examine their influence scores, and also the topics on which they engage. Kred will also rank them for influence by topic. This means that you can create a topic-based leaderboard, and see who is most influential among your contacts. You can also search for new influencers by topic, and add them to your contacts. You can analyse and score up to 500 contacts free.

Kred’s blogs provide a useful resource for influencers and experts

Kred’s website provides a whole series of blogs, including success stories, and tips to grow your network. Topics include events, influence, and identity, and are aimed at different groups including developers, marketers, agencies and influencers. The blogs range from updates on changes to Kred introduced as a result of user feedback, through to articles about free SEO tools for marketers, as well as influencers’ stories. You can browse them all, or search by topic.

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