lately my mind has been on twitter. i can’t help it with all the coverage tweeter has seen over the past years. i’ve been skimming a number of analyses on why twitter is popular, relevant, and how they could generate revenue. now i’m wondering if there’s a really good way to measure one’s ranking in the twitterverse.
i did a quick search on twitter rankings and came across the following systems:
twitterholic – there’s not much detail on how rank is determined other than them calculating individual statistics on each twitter user. from the looks of it, ranking is largely determined by the number of followers one has. i rank 265,485th. i have no idea what that means.
twitterrank – they compare themselves to google’s pagerank… part of their calculation takes into consideration the number of replies for a given user. that makes sense… at least to some degree. my twitterrank is 16.15 and i’m approximately in the 36.55 percentile. like twitterholic, i don’t know what that number means. does it take into consideration the total number of replies directed to me? how about the number of replies from different/unique users?
tweeterboard – the site is down but from what i found it measured influence by monitoring conversations. it sounds similar to twitterrank. would have loved to see this in action.
i’m giving up on figuring out one’s twitter ranking. building off of tweeterboard and twitterrank, i am interested in measuring the reach of a tweet. for a given user, what’s the likelihood my tweet will be seen by everyone following me. off the top of my head, some factors that could determine a message’s reach:
- active audience – are my followers active twitterers? if they haven’t tweeted recently (let’s say 1-2 weeks), chances are they won’t see my message.
- how many other people are my followers following? these people are the competition. more so if they frequently tweet relegating my tweet off the screen to the “next page”.
- how frequently do i tweet over the course of a day? an hour? if i’m too chatty, people will start ignoring my tweets. the same goes with carrying too many conversations. i view conversations as a one sided discussion that people will ignore.
- how many people have retweeted my message in the past week or two? retweeted messages can significantly expand the reach of a message.
am i missing anything? i’ll add to the list as new criteria come to mind.
