Every month we get great questions from our Business Support members focused on a wide variety of issues. With all the controversy surrounding links and the Google penalties we decided to upgrade the following question to be published so that you could learn from it as well...

"With Bing now including Klout within their social sidebar, it's got a lot of our clients asking how they can influence their own Klout scores and gain some increased visibility. Can you provide us some tips on how we can raise their scores naturally?

Answer: Klout continues to position itself as THE measure of influence for the social media world. Klout's recent relationship with Bing considerably expanded its visual profile in search, so your client's request isn't surprising.

So far, Bing has added in 45,000+ Klout-scored experts and authors into their search results. This number is expected to grow exponentially and if you want to get on the bandwagon, raising your score is a good place to start.

Briefly, let's discuss how Klout works its magic in the social influence measurement sphere. Klout uses over 50 different variables to rate a Twitter account from 1-100 in terms of the account's overall reach and online sphere of influence. The higher your Klout score, the stronger your perceived account and the wider your social media reach.

Klout calculates a score based on three major metrics including True Reach (the size of your engaged audience), Amplification Probability (the likelihood your content provokes an action) and Network Influence (the influence level of your engaged audience). Your Klout score is thus a representation of how successfully you engage your audience and how big of an impact you have on this same audience.

According to Klout's own FAQs, the average Klout score is around 40 with anything over 60 being pretty good. It also notes that follower numbers are the least important metric when figuring a Klout score — Engagement is the highest.

How do you get your Klout score increased...

• Connect Your Accounts: Klout calculates your score based on your social reach. The more social networks you attach, the higher your chance of generating a strong Klout score. Right now Klout allows connections from twelve different social networks, including: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, Last.fm, and Flickr. Other networks are pending. Connect them all.

• Update Regularly: Klout scores are heavily influenced by ReTweets (RTs), @replies, Facebook Likes, Google Pluses, and viral content shares. The BEST way to generate these is to publish high-quality engaging content at regular intervals. Use a program like Sprout Social or Tweet Deck and set-up content scheduling. Track your average reach and identify the best times to publish your content. Hit those sweet spots regularly.

  Pro Tip: Start adding Tips to Foursquare venues where you check-in. When these tips are completed by users or added to to-do lists, these make you look influential. Here are a list of tips from my own account for example purposes.

• Engage Influencers: Klout organizes its influencers into categories or topics. These topics cover everything from SEO to Interior Design to Beer (a personal favorite of mine). Each day Klout gives you 10 votes or "+Ks" that you can spend as influence on other accounts. Use these to vote up people within your specific spheres of influence to "get on their radar." You can also use your daily allotment to buy a specific topic. So if you want to start accumulating +Ks for Blogging, you'd expend some daily votes to add that into your profile.

• Participate in Chats: Klout gives value to RTs, @replies and Google Plus votes, at a higher clip than most other voting signals. Great ways to influence these metrics are to participate in live blog chats, Google+ Hangouts, or engage in popular multi-reply discussions on Facebook.

  Pro Tip: Use a site like TweetChat which allows you to enter a hashtag and follow a Twitter chat in real-time without superfluous tweets getting in the way. It also auto-updates all your replies with the hashtag and makes following the discussion a snap!

• Share Awesome Content: As we mentioned in Update Regularly, high-quality, engaging content is the best way to generate viral shares. Three specific areas of content that WILL be successful in raising your Klout score are the following:
  
  
  1. niche-related content (content around your specific area of specialization)
  2. quotable content (quotes from history, humor or from those within your industry)
  3. photos (photos have the HIGHEST EdgeRank on Facebook and are the easiest things to encourage viral reach)

Klout is here to stay and we expect it will continue to expand its social-search ties with Bing in 2013. If you haven't added Klout to your reputational marketing and customer outreach efforts yet, now has never been a better time.

- Casey Markee, Writer & Lead SEO Consultant, Planet Ocean. Connect with him on Klout!