Got Twitter Clout? New Tools Rate You
Are you a Twitter star, tweeting up a storm and being followed by many influential people -- or are you a whale of a fail? New tools let you, and others, judge your Twitter influence level. Here's a look at how you're being ranked.
CIO — How influential are you on Twitter? That's what several sites are now promising to judge, labeling you by doing everything from calculating your "social capital" to knocking you for a "low Twitter efficiency."
These Twitter ranking sites vary in how calculations are made—some basic sites rely solely on the number of tweets, retweets and followers, while others use more complicated algorithms to determine results.
Many Twitter users flock to these sites for an ego boost, or to gauge how they compare with their peers, says Dan Schawbel, a personal branding expert and author of Me 2.0. But these rankings also offer an interesting peek into what you can do to be more present on the microblogging site, he says. Be careful not to focus too much on your rankings, though, Schawbel says. "You will lose the opportunity to build real relationships with people."
Here are my picks for five useful Twitter ranking sites, and a look at how each one determines your worth, rank and influence. Even if you're not into rankings, these tools deserve your attention—your peers and potential future employers may use them to judge you.
1. Buzzom.
Buzzom's statistic feature analyzes your Twitter information and displays a number of charts and graphs depicting your top profile matches and your influence in the Twittersphere. Your "influence" score, for example, is calculated by determining the ratio of number of people you are following to the number of people who are following you (your score is higher if people are willing to follow you even if you don't follow them back). Your "retweet" score is determined by how often others retweet you, and your "tweet efficiency" score is determined by comparing your tweet rate to your followers—if you tweet often and you have few followers, it deems your tweets "wasted" and you receive a low score. Finally, your overall score (which Buzzom calls the "InRev TwitIn Score") is calculated by taking all these scores into consideration.
2. Topsy.
Topsy functions primarily as a Twitter search engine, but also categorizes top Twitter users as "influential" or "highly influential" based on a few factors, including: how often you're cited in tweets and how influential the people are who tweet about you or the links you post. For example, the site states: "If Alice retweets a tweet from Bob, and Carol retweets Alice, Bob's tweet has not only reached his and Alice's followers, but also Carol's." The more frequently influential people retweet you, the higher your influence will be. Topsy awards the "highly influential" title to roughly 0.2 percent of its users, while 0.5 percent earn the "influential" title.
