Twitter Friday: How to Measure Twitter Authority?
This week the focus of much Twitter buzz was the question how to measure Twitter authority. There is a growing sentiment and consensus that it can’t be the sheer number of followers as it’s easily manipulated and even if the followers are real you can’t effectively follow them back without drowning in information overflow.
So a huge following on Twitter makes it a one way broadcasting channel similar to old media a instead of the much touted one to one social networking conversation.
Numerous experiments are on the way to measure Twitter authority. Some are quite simple while others are already scientific. They analyze, organize and categorize quite impressive amounts of raw data.
Two simple attempts at measuring Twitter authority are by “#followfriday” endorsements and by retweets or retweetability. Both attempts are not wrong but like the sheer number of followers quite limited to one metric. Some people might not get retweeted much but still be Twitter giants.
Two very complex and advanced attempts at finding out who really matters on Twitter are those by Twitalyzer and TwitterFriends.
Twitalyzer introduces a whole set of Twitter activity metrics. They get measured and also evaluated. The metrics are:
- Influence
- Signal
- Generosity
- Velocity
- Clout
I especially like the signal to noise ratio as it shows who’s just chatting and who offers real value on Twitter by links, retweets, hashtags, mentions of other people. My ratio is above 80%. My other metrics are mostly bad though.
TwitterFriends is really a whole suite of different tools to analyze, organize and visualize your Twitter network and actvity. I’ve seen quite a lot Twitter analytics and stats tools but this one seems the by far the most advanced to me as of now. For instance my link quotient is at 31.6% while the Twitter average is just 20%. So I guess that almost one third of my tweets contain a link while the average Twitter user adds a link to every fifth tweet.
How good/bad are your stats? Add them in the comment section! I might start following you if they’re good enough ;-)
Did you like this post? It’s part of a weekly column called Twitter Friday. Make sure to come back in a week and check out the last one.
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:03 pm
@cheth that is neat http://tinyurl.com/dg6jvd science to twitter
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Twitter Friday: How to Measure Twitter Authority? | SEOptimise: This week the focus of much Twitter buzz was the.. http://tinyurl.com/dg6jvd
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:03 pm
latest @seoptimise twitter friday post from @onreact_com How to Measure Twitter Authority? http://tinyurl.com/dg6jvd
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:03 pm
How to measure Twitter authority? – http://tinyurl.com/dg6jvd
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:03 pm
RT @mattukHow to measure Twitter authority? – http://tinyurl.com/dg6jvd
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:03 pm
@briansolis couldn’t find one, but this post on Twitter authority is quite interesting http://tinyurl.com/dg6jvd
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:03 pm
How to Measure Twitter Authority? http://bit.ly/k9FP
September 2nd, 2010 at 10:03 pm
How exactly do you measure Twitter Authority? Can you even do it properly? http://tinyurl.com/dg6jvd
March 7th, 2009 at 11:53 am
This is really a very fascinating post. I am going to bookmark the website and I’ll keep on coming back.
March 7th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I completely agree followers alone is a relatively ineffective measure. Tools that incorporate more than one factor are more useful. Another is the one my company produced, Twitter Grader: http://twitter.grader.com/
March 8th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Great post! Nice to see some new criteria being used for Twitter Authority. Like you, my signal to noise ratio is high (93.8), but my other metrics are rather low.
Thanks!
@deidrehughey
March 8th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
[...] Twitter Friday: How to Measure Twitter Authority? | SEOptimise – This week the focus of much Twitter buzz was the question how to measure Twitter authority. There is a growing sentiment and consensus that it can’t be the sheer number of followers as it’s easily manipulated and even if the followers are real you can’t effectively follow them back without drowning in information overflow. [...]
March 9th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Interesting post, thanks. I think we’re moving to twitter obsession where people spend more time looking at the tools and less time with a focus on the quality and relevance of communication. The twitter friends visualisation tab just seems pointless to me?! I really don’t care how I compare against the average, what relevance is that? There are thousands of tweeters who tweet about the coffee they just drank or the colour of the sky. Their usage of twitter is far removed from mine, so comparison is pointless. What is interesting is the impact of my updates on my network of followers and how many people use my links (twitclicks.com is a good starting point). I still like Zappos approach which is to not measure but simply use twitter as a great communication tool.
Keep the articles coming though, it is good to read other people’s evaluation of social media tools.
thanks
james
April 29th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Just to reiterate what James mentioned- its easy to start looking for Twitter metrics in the same way that we look at website metrics. But if you take the definition of what you mention above, its pretty easy to gain “authority”. Nor do I actively think about my ratio of tweets to links.
Should Twitter not be about engagement / communicating your brand values?. I’m pretty sure you dont get that from being Mr Retweet – unless the links are material you’ve written yourself. For me personally, I’d love to see the Twitter landscape if everyone had the same amount of traffic – and see how would people use their Twitter stream to add value.
April 30th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Great Arcitle!
I wonder what the results will be? Ill stay tuned to find out!
Http://www.Twitter.com/OliverMGraf
June 8th, 2009 at 6:02 am
[...] Several bloggers followed up on the thread and suggested initial ideas notably by twittermaven and seoptimise. [...]
March 25th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
It´s hard to really measure the authority of a Twitter account since there is no way of knowing how valuable it´s followers are or how much value can be put on the tweets.