Tuesday, May 19, 2009

TweeterScore: a Tweeter report card

I made some enhancements to that original Tweetquency spreadsheet I posted, and turned it into something a bit more useful (an overstatement, for sure). While it's fun to look at the profiles of tweeters on Twitter, to see how many people they follow or follow them, it might be more interesting to understand their tweeting habits. How often do they tweet? How often do they reply or include a link? I created this "Tweeter report card" to help do this easily for any Twitter screen name.

We can't use the typical subjects seen in school report cards (thank goodness), so I had to make up some of our own. Here's what you'll see on the TweeterScore report card which spans the past n tweets (which you can set between 5 and 500):
  • Tweetquency, viewed as a chart (this version, btw, lets you change the charting buckets, in case you want more detail for those tweeters who are too concentrated in the long or short end of the duration curve (sorry - sounds like wall st.).
  • Follow factor - which is a simple measure of the "cost of getting a follower". It's just a ratio the number of followers one has for each person they follow. A super high number here usually represents a celebrity of sorts.

  • Quietness - which rates high for the less tweety of us in the crowd (included, quite simply, to make me feel better about my tweetlessness), an inverse measure of the next one...
  • Chattiness - which is the average number of tweets per day. These inversely represent the same data which is in the tweetquency chart, but on average. The most chatty will have numbers above 20 or more (hi Tara!)
  • Link-i-ness rates the percentage of recent tweets which contained a link
  • @Reply-ness shows the percentage of recent tweets which contained at least one @reply.
Beyond pure fun, the usefulness of these measures might arise when, for example, a small business wants to know the habits of another tweeter whom they feel is doing things "right" on twitter. See some examples included here - such as CNN Breaking News - which hardly ever includes a link, has huge followfactor (they don't need to follow others to get people to follow them) and they only tweet on average about once per day (rounded, but still surprised me). Then look at Orli Yakuel, who is constantly pointing people to great products and sites, including links in 62% of her recent tweets. Matt Cutts and Tara Hunt (missrogue) just have huge followings, but one doesn't follow many people and the other does - so their followfactors are quite different. I have some ideas for how the trends seen across types of tweeters would make an interesting thesis either in business or social research... for example, Techcrunch (not shown here) had a Linkiness score of 100% over the 250 tweets I collected. Sounds like a Blogging business trend we might have predicted. I also bet the general shape of a tweeter's Tweetquency chart can be indicative of...(yawn)... ok - I'm boring myself now... on to the next project ;) I'll write more about how this was all done in a future post - and then describe a more useful way to use these mechanics.... but for now, if you want to score a few tweeters you know - Get your own copy of TweeterScore... and find me on the first day of 140tc or at GoogleIO next week if you have questions about all this sheet ;)

4 comments:

Ivan Zuzak said...

very cool, jr!

Anonymous said...

great! :D

ilan said...

great job. i didn't encounter the early spreadsheet, but i love playing with this one.
good luck!

smileursula said...

amazing!