How do I add a Klout badge to my website or blog (Blogger or Wordpress)?

A few years ago, Klout used to openly provide badges; they stopped, no one's quite sure why.

Fear not, it's not actually as hard as you think!

Firstly, what is Klout?

The Klout Score, a number between one and 100, is a representation of your overall social media influence. The science behind the Score examines more than 400 variables on multiple social networks beyond your number of followers and friends. It looks at who is engaging with your content and who they are sharing it with.

Basically, social media is not about how popular (if popularity is measured by statistics like followers and likes) you are, it's about how engaging you are.  Do you have 300,000 Twitter followers?  Perhaps; but are they listening to what you're saying?  If the answer's "no", you have some work to do.

It (this list was correct at the time of publishing) uses Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, Last.fm and Flickr to do its voodoo; you need to add which service you want it to know about.

Now don't worry if you have relatively low numbers of followers on a specific channel, remember Klout measures the engagement, not just the 'number of' and gives you this lovely score out of 100.  Using this score, you can quickly get an idea of how well you're engaging your audience as a whole.

It's especially useful for people (or brands) wanting to increase their reach.

But let's assume you already (or at least, now) know what Klout is, you just want to add to your website, or Blogger, or Wordpress......or wherever.

I've found a couple of options for this, but under the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid), I like this one the best.  This option uses an iframe (in-line frame: a 'window' within your webpage to look through to another webpage) to grab your details; this means it's widely supported and super-snappy to load.

Here's the code, just grab this and pop it into your website, html/script plugin or gadget, change "your-twitter-ID" for.....well, your Twitter ID and you're away.


<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="110px" scrolling="no" src="http://widgets.klout.com/badge/your-twitter-ID" style="border: 0;" width="160px"></iframe>

It should look a little something like this.  Not quite as good looking, granted, but you get the point.

So think about how engaging your content is, how you can improve that and who your audience is.  What will work well for one person will not necessarily work well at all for another; the same very much applies to brands.

Know your audience, know your score; words to tweet by.