Today I was given the assignment of measuring twitter influence. Here is what I did. All in all, it seemed to work well:
- I pulled the entire TwapperKeeper archive for the username (both @ mentions and mentions without the @)
- I went to The Archivist and looked at the analytics for the username and search term, looking for amount of retweets and mentions
- I went to Friend or Follow and downloaded the CSV files for the friends and fans of the given username. I looked at how many followers were following my followers and what their influence was.
- I went to Klout and looked at the individual achievements of the user and of the user’s network.
- I went to Twitter Grader and checked out the trajectory of followers (in beautiful line graph form, no less)
- I pulled all of the retweets of blog post announcement tweets from Disqus just for good measure.
- I went to Twitalyzer to see what other people consider influential about the user’s stream.
After all of this, I have a huge amount of data and I know quite a little bit about how a network has knit itself together. I can see just how far the influence reaches, and what are its boundaries.
But, the real question is: If you aren’t on Twitter, does Twitter influence matter?
Yes.