Say Hello to #NewKlout: Klout Steps Into the Content Discovery Space

Yesterday, Klout took a big step into the content discovery space with the launch of #NewKlout. Previously, the company was all about scoring your influence on social media and partnering you up with brands to reward those with high scores. Now, Klout wants to help you raise your influence score by surfacing interesting content for you to share.

According to Klout's announcement, this interesting content is tailored to what "will strike a chord with your unique set of friends, fans, and followers." Then, Klout lets you share that interesting content through their platform, which you can measure by seeing your Klout score go up and down. 

On my first run-in with the new platform, I'll admit: I wasn't immediately blown away. Despite having topics that are mostly relevant to my interests (social media, blogging, marketing, Facebook, and public relations), my feed was littered with content from one PR-focused publication:

Removing "public relations" from my topics, though, helped improve the relevancy of the results. Scrolling through, I found stories from sites I typically like reading. There were also visual indicators of trending stories, which could help me prioritize what to read and share. 

It's been about a day since #NewKlout launched, and my suggested stories haven't changed too much, so we'll see if the algorithm updates more quickly in the future. 

That's pretty much it on the actual product update side, folks. What's interesting about #NewKlout isn't necessarily the features themselves -- it's the overall trend of social networks getting into the content discovery space. 

#NewKlout, Paper, and LinkedIn Pulse: Social Networks Getting Into Content Discovery

With Facebook's recent launch of Paper and LinkedIn's acquisition of Pulse, there's a really hot trend of social networks trying to solve the content discovery problem on the internet. Since there is now more content online than ever before, and more people are spending their time on social media, each network wants to make sure people are spending their time with them.

The way to do that? Distill the signals from the noise and provide relevant content to their users. More relevant content means more time people will spend on their platform, which means they'll have greater opportunities to surface ads to those people. It makes sense why Klout would want to start surfacing content to its users -- everyone else is doing it.

Basically, I think we can all agree that Klout wasn't too sticky before -- you found out your score and then left. Now, with more content to discover and share, Klout could have a fighting chance in the social network battle for content discovery dominance. Maybe Klout's algorithm could help surface more relevant content than the other networks. Only time will tell.

What do you think of the new Klout? Would you use it to discover new content? Leave your thoughts with us in the comments.