Be kind, Re-tweet. (If you enjoy this)
Google tends to bandwagon jump and over-index the vogue site of the day. Not long ago, every search had some emo kid's myspace page showing up in the top ten results. Then they decided to crawl every Youtube comment ever, and we all know how much utility those have. Now, within hours, your every mundane tweet is searchable.
Simultaneously, people are beginning to realize that number of followers isn't the best indication of influence on Twitter. Any idiot can auto-follow and be auto-followed by plenty of other attention seeking "experts" who aren't really listening. How then, do we truly measure someone's actual broadcast power? By doing what Twitter is all about, listening to what other people are saying.
One way to measure influence is noting how many times a person's tweets have been favored by others. In this disposable real-time world, someone wanting to save one of your 140 character snippets for future reference has a lot of meaning. So, go ahead and Google:
site:twitter.com/*/favourites USERNAME (note the U in favourites)
where obviously, "username" is yours. You might need to click "repeat and include the omitted results" at the page bottom. Surprised by how high or low the number is? Well don't worry too much - a lot of people don't use the favorites feature to its full potential. Me included because until recently, favoring an update from Tweetdeck was a major pain. It's also noteworthy that some users automatically favor every tweet directed @ them for future reference, especially before the @replies tab was changed to "mentions."
For some types of user, mentions, replies and retweets will be more relevant than the number of times favored. Problem: Twitter's "real-time" search often misses results, doesn't tell you how many results there are, and only goes back about a month. Wouldn't ya know, there's an easy way to measure this too using Google Search:
site:twitter.com/*/status/ @USERNAME -site:twitter.com/USERNAME/status/
Just fill in the relevant username. The first portion searches through status updates which include the user you're ranking. The second is a control to weed out any references to oneself in the third person. :)
Make sure to click "repeat search with the omitted results" if the option is there and voila - a true measure of your influence. For an added "equalizer," use the advanced search page and limit results to a relevant time frame, say, the last month.
While we're on the subject of Googlefluence. @Ev's Twitter profile has a Google pagerank of 7/10. @Scobleizer also is a 7. Like most users, I'm a 4 (@Oprah is too, but likely not for long), and newer accounts range from 0 to 3.
If you'd think when Googling "site:twitter.com" the top results would be the home page, then the most popular (or linked-to) Twitter accounts, you'd only be half right. The first result is the "What are you doing" homepage (pagerank 9), but the second is a seemingly random user, @beeahna (rank 4). With 433 followers and 972 updates, I'm not sure why she stands out (save for alphabetically.) Using the methods outlined above, she has received 36 mentions and been favored 35 times according to Google. She was also the 14,258,369th Twitter account created. Anyone care to offer an explanation on this?
Thanks for reading. Let me know how you measured up. Next post will be: "Conversation Killers - How Twitter Clients Actually Reduce Usefulness"
0 comments:
Post a Comment