Ranking evangelical universities by their Klout score

By W. Scott Lamb - Wednesday, March 1, 2017

How do top evangelical universities rank according to their Klout score?

What is that?

Everyone who uses social media has a Klout score, tabulated by Klout.com based on an algorithmic look under the hood of all their social media presence and influence. Raw numbers of “likes” and “followers” aren’t the ultimate barometer. Instead, the Klout score figures out how much your social media presence online leads the pack within your industry or interest.

So how do evangelical universities rank? I chose the “2015 Newsmax Top 10 Evangelical Christian Colleges” list. A few caveats.

First, when talking about evangelicals, I’ll invariably get responses telling me that somebody or some institution should or shouldn’t be considered Evangelical. But that conversation is outside the scope of this post. If Newsmax threw them on the list, then that’s good enough for our purposes here.

Second, I know that the Newsmax list isn’t as robust or scientific as the U.S. News or Forbes. Newsmax says it factors in data, but it also seems to be based on a calculated hunch. But that actually serves the purpose of this post just fine, because we’re thinking about “Klout”—a play on the work “clout” — and so the perception of influence is important. I don’t want to say much more about that, lest we get into “Moneyball” conversation about data vs. instinct in evaluations.

NEWSMAX TOP 10 EVANGELICAL SCHOOLS

Ok, so now for the Klout scores. Ranging from 1 to 100 (Harvard University=99), how do the evangelical universities fare?

KLOUT | # TWITTER FOLLOWERS

@Baylor Klout: 93 | 83,000
@TCU Klout: 87 | 111,000
@SMU Klout: 86 | 31,000
@LibertyU Klout: 85 | 68,000
@BiolaU Klout: 68 | 22,000
@EmoryUniversity Klout: 67 | 34,000
@Macalester Klout: 65 | 8,000
@StOlaf Klout: 59 | 8,000
@WheatonCollege Klout: 59 | 12,000
@Regent Klout: 58 | 9,000

Baylor’s Klout is only 6 points less than Harvard’s, even though Harvard has nine times the followers. They have been in the news a lot this year, for better or worse, and that translates into a lot more social media buzz.

I did some more research for a sampling of evangelical schools I know that have strong, academic reputations. It seems like that type of reputation is of little service to their Klout score, if they don’t have at least 15-20,000 followers.

One final note, if you include all universities in the U.S., then 84.2 is the minimum Klout score needed to break into the Top 100. Using that criterion, only Baylor, Texas Christian University, Southern Methodist University, and Liberty University hit the overall top 100 list. All four of these schools have NCAA Division I athletic programs, so that certainly factors in as well.