Twitter Influence Graders: Behind the Green Curtain

Does influence on Twitter matter? And, if it does, what is the best way to measure it?

On the first question it seems reasonable to say influence only matters if all or part of the reason you are on Twitter is for business … then “influence” matters.

So if it matters to you, how do you measure influence?

In Twitter 1.0 most believed: Followers = Influence. Clearly the world of Twitter has moved on.

Today there are many tools that claim to measure an individual’s influence using up to 140 characters.

I decided to look at the three Twitter influence graders I use and ask questions of the people behind the tools. Here’s what I found:

Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader is just one of the many free analytics tools from the always helpful folks at Hubspot. I heard back from Dharmesh Shah, the founder at HubSpot himself (and @dharmesh on Twitter).

Twitter Grader ranks Tweeps on a scale up to 100 and allows comparisons to others by city and state, as well as analysis of followers and those you are following.

Dharmesh says Twitter Grader looks at a number of factors but one of the most important is the degree of "engagement" for a user.

“So, if a given user seems to be getting more retweets and responses to their tweets, they would get a higher grade.

“This makes sense, because this ‘engagement’ score acts as a decent proxy for influence,” he says. “We also look at the number of followers – with some adjustments for when an account has a lot of low-quality followers.”

Dharmesh went on to say that what people should know is that Twitter Grader measures on a curve (i.e. a relative scale). “So, as the Twitter user-base evolves, the scores adjust automatically. So, when a user gets a grade of 80, it means that based on the factors we look at, that user scored higher than 80 percent of the other users that have been graded.”

He concluded by acknowledging that calculating authority on Twitter is not a perfect science, but that Hubspot, who has been doing this for a while, has evolves its algorithm as it learns more about how Twitter is being used.

Twitalyzer

On behalf of Twitalyzer I heard back from its creator, Eric T. Peterson, Chief Executive Officer and Principal Consultant at Web Analytics Demystified, Inc (and @erictpeterson on Twitter).

Eric says Twitalyzer, which can spit out analytics in dozens of categories, decided that humans know that influence is “something we see and experience every day in our lives” and “that being complex for complexity's sake was a bad idea. So we fixed that.”

With the Twitalyzer 2.0 release his company made changes to the old "influence" calculation and started calling it "impact."

“At the same time we dramatically simplified the influence calculation to look at the two measures we believe best reflected the pure definition of influence (‘causing something without any direct or apparent effort’): retweets and references,” Eric said.

That way anyone tracking their influence in real time will find “the more you invest in Twitter as a communication medium, the more influential you will become,” he said.

And while he personally does not see influence on Twitter as some kind of contest “if you're a business person paid to Twitter and you can’t move your Impact score up, something is wrong.”

“This is why we provide recommendations in Twitalyzer Dashboard ... to help our business users understand how they can improve their impact in Twitter,” Eric said.

TweetLevel

On behalf of TweetLevel I heard back from its creator, Jonny Bentwood, Head of Analyst Relations and Strategy at Edelman in London (and @jonnybentwood on Twitter).

TweetLevel tallies up scores in popularity, engagement and trust to reach an influence score. It does this with a transparent calculation it reveals on its About page that includes data from such places as Twitalyzer and Twinfluence.

Jonny told me that the key aspect when measuring influence with Tweetlevel is context. Within context the tool examines the “location of the conversation” and the type of influencer (including those that create, amplify, adapt or comment).

TweetLevel doesn’t “confuse popularity with importance,” but instead focuses on “micro topics” and understanding who are the key people in those areas. Jonny added: “TweetLevel is a dynamic tool that will alter someone’s score depending upon that user’s current usage.”

“The tool will continually evolve as Twitter adapts its API and functionality (such as the recent introduction of lists and change in the way retweets work). TweetLevel will take this new data and include it in the algorithm,” he said.

In terms of what TweetLevel’s scores mean (on a scale of 1 to 100) Jonny said his tool’s score is the equivalent of someone’s Google PageRank x 10. A score above 80 is truly exceptional and below 25 is not too good. For the everyday user that means a score over 40 is good, over 50 is great and over 60 is amazing

So what did I learn? It seems that of the three tools I use (for myself and clients) all have their value.

I think anyone relying too heavily on one influence measuring tool is likely getting a skewed picture of influence. Maybe there is a place for an “influence aggregator” that scores each user across multiple influence tools.

What do you think? Does Social Media , and Twitter specifically, need this?

Possibly related post
7 Tools To Find Who’s Big on Twitter

7 Tools to Find Who's ‘Big on Twitter’

Social Media can be an overwhelming place: so many people, so little time. So, on Twitter for example, how do you measure influence?

I was curious: Who are the BWOT (Big Women On Twitter) or BMOT (Big Men on Twitter)?

There are six influence graders I like (and yes, I know there are more – please share them) plus a bonus:


1. TweetLevel

This “nifty little service cooked up by Edelman” is still in Beta testing. But it is already my favorite. The composite Influence score is made up of Popularity (followers), Engagement (how much you talk to individuals) and Trust (how often you’re re-tweeted).

Under the About section Edelman’s formula is there for all to see (and isn’t transparency a wonderful thing?) Under Influence Tips there is some great advice on how to succeed on Twitter. And the “How you compare to a few of your friends” feature is a nice touch.


2. Twitalyzer

Probably the most comprehensive free Twitter influence analyzer – but be prepared to spend a lot of time if you want to go deep.

Here, a Tweep is measured in five areas: Influence (friends, followers, frequency of update and signal combined), Signal (the tendency for people to pass along information, as opposed to anecdote), Generosity (the propensity to retweet another), Velocity (your rate of tweeting) and Clout (the likelihood that other people will reference you).

The depth here is amazing: Want to see how you stack up over the past week, the past three months or “all time”? You can do that here. Want to calculate your Return on Influence, Conduct a Consolidated Account Analysis or Learn How to Increase Your Influence? It’s all here. Pack a lunch!

Recent updates (the new look-and-feel and analysis in real time – as opposed to 24-hour delay that had been the norm) make this one really useful tool.


3. Twitter Analyzer

This is a cool tool that slices and dices your time on Twitter for approximately the past 14 days. Here you can learn about your Popularity (total mentions and number of unique people mentioning you) and Reach (total number of people reached and percentage of messages retweeted). But that’s just the beginning. There’s also analysis of Friends, Mentions and Groups.

Want to know your most common hashtag or the person on Twitter who retweets you the most? It’s here. The Online Followers window is a cool minute-by-minute look at how many of your followers are currently online (helpful for timing tweets)

My favorite tool is the Followers Density Map. By mousing over the world map you can see where your followers are (big shout out to the six folks in Latvia who follow me at @mikefixs!) My quibble with this tool is that it seems to have a significant number of sub-tools “coming soon” (and has had them “coming soon” for some time).


4. TwitterGrader

This is, as the saying goes, “an oldy, but a goody.” This tool, from the fine folks at Hubspot is a solid standby. But, it doesn’t reveal how it measures people on Twitter and even changes the algorithm with barely an explanation. Transparency here would make for a much more useful tool.

And there are a couple of major annoyances keeping me from being a huge fan. First, being able to find the Twitter Elite by location is cool, but leave out a comma (in Rochester, N.Y., for example) and you will get a different set of results. Secondly, take any dive into the analytics and try to hit the “Back” button on your browser … you will get the “Webpage Expired” message and you have to start over. Yuck!

And here’s the thing: if a Twitter user has not submitted to being graded (or has not had someone else submit their Twitter name) they do not show up in TwitterGrader results. So it’s your influence among people who also use TwitterGrader – a subset of the Twittersphere.

5. Twitin

So this site does a whole lot of things, but for our purposes check out the Twitin Stats page. Here you’ll find rankings for Tweeter Efficiency (number of followers plus time between tweets), Influence Ratio (unexplained on the page), Retweet Count (how often you are retweeted) and Followers Rank (the number and influence of your followers).

An interesting feature is the “Profile Matches” that tells you who your profile most closely resembles. Will you be a Celebrity, a Web Developer or a Rocket Scientist?


6. Tweet Grade

Like you favorite teacher this grader is an easy grader – a lot of people get an A or an A+. Having said that it’s a good place to check up on people you might want to follow. And, yes, you can grade yourself and tweet the results to the world.


And the bonus:
7. Follower Wonk

And yes I know it’s not technically an influence grader … but it is addictive and will tell you how two or three Twitter accounts stack up. It is very useful when comparing accounts who are competitive or in the same geographic area and very quickly tells you who has the large (an d perhaps) more influential following.

I hope at least one or two of these Twitter influence tools proves useful to you.

In Social Media it’s not just about the numbers – it’s also about what you do with those numbers.

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What Twitter isn’t