Klout revamps metrics to better gauge social influence

San Francisco—Social analytics company Klout Inc., which provides a measure of user influence across social sites, has increased the number of analytical factors it uses to better gauge a person's social prominence.

Klout now uses 400 factors to judge social influence, up from the previous 100. Some of the new elements include whether users have Wikipedia profiles, the prominence of their titles and companies listed on LinkedIn, retweet volume from their Twitter posts and who tags them in Facebook photos.

Klout said its new metrics take into account 12 billion pieces of data daily, compared with 1 billion before, gaining a better picture of a person's true social influence.