One would have thought that by now, Klout would have included YouTube data. People do after all make hiring decisions based on Klout score (allegedly), and YouTube has been the biggest social video site on the Internet for years. However, one would have been wrong. That is until today.

Lithium Technologies, which acquired Klout last year, announced today that the Klout Score algorithm now incorporates YouTube data, including views, shares, likes, and dislikes for content a user or brand has created and posted.

“This further extends Klout’s lead in measuring online influence for individuals and brands—and brings the total number of networks incorporated into the Klout Score to nine,” the company says in an announcement. “Score changes will manifest over the next week as YouTube activity is factored in.”

“If social media is going to continue to play a meaningful part in consumers’ lives, they need a method of cutting through the ever-increasing noise to reach the right content and the right people,” said Sunil Rajasekar, CTO of Lithium Technologies. “This is the fundamental challenge our data science team is working to solve, and with the addition of YouTube to the Klout score we can now offer consumers even more accurate and well-rounded user profiles, and a more comprehensive map of the social web. Combined with topic expertise which we debuted in May (link here), the YouTube addition makes the Klout Score more robust and meaningful than ever.”

Lithium says that over 700 million social profiles are contained within the Klout system. It evaluates over 400 signals from nine networks.

Klout scores will change based on the YouTube data over the course of the next week.

Image via YouTube