How Do You Measure Twitter Influence: Is It Worth Measuring?

So  ”How Do You Measure Twitter Influence?” .. Is it worth attempting to put a metric to?  This question is becoming more relevant and will continue to be increasingly important as the growth of Twitter climbs,the worldwide takeup continues to spread and its entanglement with other social media platforms.

“Twitter Influence” could become a powerful and significant part of your brand whether its a ”personal brand” or a ”corporate brand”. So measurement is open to interpretation and different views of Twitters importance also needs to be factored into the discussion. So here are some different takes on this.

Firstly Ross Dawson makes a comment on his blog post titled “Twitter follower numbers as a Proxy of Influence” that even though this measurement is flawed its really all we have at this point in time.

He says “One of the reasons Twitter is important is that it is introducing the concept of assessing people’s degree of influence. A person’s number of Twitter followers is increasingly being taken as a proxy for their influence. If the only thing you know about someone is that they have 5,000 Twitter followers (or 50), you can make some preliminary assumptions about their influence. Of course Twitter follower numbers is a hopelessly flawed measure for many, many reasons, and pretty much everyone knows that. However it’s often all you have.Relatively few people have blogs, and in the broader population not many people know about blog ranking engines such as Technorati and Wikio. Everyone understands that numbers of Facebook and LinkedIn friends don’t indicate much other than how inclined people are to connect online”.

So yes that is a simplistic measurement of Influence but a study on “Influence on Twitter” titled  The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter, created measures for relative influence, which gives a more in depth analysis of “Influence on Twitter” by tracking in detail 12 popular users, which included popular tweeters like Ashton Kutcher and top news sites such as CNN and Mashable. The study does attribute one element of  influence on Twitter to the number of  followers but goes further.

The study defines influence on Twitter as “the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user”. The term user is defined by Twitter’s platform.

So what are some elements that contribute to Influence on Twitter according to the Study?

1. The Number of Followers

A lot of the more popular measurement of influence and importance on Twitter is based upon the number of followers you have. This assumption makes sense if you assume that twitter is a “140 character” broadcast medium that is only delivering the message that you read in the “tweet” (not the links embedded in the message), in fact a lot of “tweeters” interact with the content on the platform. Comment: The content linked and embedded within the the 140 characters is a more important measurement then the raw quantity of followers.

2. Follower to Following Ratio ( 3 Types)

Type 1: Celebrity Type Ratio. If you have a high count of followers but few people you follow back the user account might be described as focusing on the material aspect of Twitter. By material, we mean a compulsion toward moving content to other users in the environment.

Type 2: Conversationalist. If the ratio approaches 1 (an equal or near-equal amount of followers and followees), the user might be categorized as a conversationalist. The user most likely follows back a majority of his followers, to retain familiarity with more personal conversations. Contrarily, the materialistic user aims to collect followers as contacts to whom the user may push content (who may then share the same content with other users)

Type 3: Spammer. If the ratio approaches zero (low follower total versus high followee total), we might categorize the user as a spammer. As an emergent behavior, the stereotypical spammer attempts to collect users with the intent to push content to as many people as possible after achieving a high follower tally. However, most contemporary users can spot the stereotypical behavior of a spammer or bot, resulting in the low follower total on the spammer’s account.

Note: So here type one and two are obviously the more influential than type 3, but the conversationalist with a ratio of 1 to 1 is perceived as more influential (and in the Hubspot grading system is treated as such)

3. The Ability to Create Actions is an important element of measuring “Twitter Influence”. This is part of the Twitter Infrastructure.   So what are 4 core actions on Twitter

• The Reply: Example… @chrisbrogan Thanks for this. I’m new to twitter and it was really helpful
• The Retweet: Example….  RT @aplusk great article thank U RT @Morgan_Johnston: this great article on health care by Whole Foods cofounder/CEO
• The  Mention: In fact, a mention is similar to a reply, except a mention occurs at some point in the tweet other than at the beginning
  • This {content} @username ({content})
    Watching @BarackObama speak in Colorado on @CNN
• Attribution: This where you attribute where the message or action came from
  • eg{content} via @username ({content})
    Fire at Kuwaiti wedding kills dozens, official media says http://bit.ly/wn95A (via @cnnbrk)

Note: Similar to the reply and the retweet, the mention and the attribution are categorized as actions because they too are applied by a user to a piece of content. So the distribution and promotion of content is an important part of influence as well as the conversations and follower count. So its not just the follower count and the follower ratio that is important but the response to the different actions as described above to the Tweets.

So the conclusions from the report:

• Mashable is more influential than CNN.
• Sockington is more influential than MCHammer, while MCHammer is more influential than three major social media analysts (garyvee, Scobleizer, and chrisbrogan).
• Celebrities with higher follower totals (eg., THE_REAL_SHAQ and ijustine) foster more conversation than provide retweetable content.
• News outlets, regardless of follower count, influence large amounts of followers to republish their content to other users.

So after looking at what constitutes “Influence on Twitter” what are some tools to measure influence or grade it.

One tool that seems to be increasingly accepted and used is the ”Twitter Grader” app from Hubspot which has come up with the following measurements and rules it uses to grade twitterers with currently over 4.7 Million tweeters graded.