Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [74]
Twinfluence (www.twinfluence.com), shown in Figure 10-3, and TwitterGrader (http://twitter.grader.com), shown in Figure 10-4, can help you figure out how you compare with other users, but even they use fairly arbitrary measures. You can also use these sites to determine who the popular users are in your geographical location.
Figure 10-3: Twinfluence stats, showing @algore’s popularity.
Figure 10-4: Twitter-Grader, suggesting the humble @pista-chio’s visibility.
For all intents and purposes, these numbers don’t really measure influence or reach. The results you can get from these sites are so imprecise and subjective that they provide only a rough understanding of how influence flows through the Twitter ecosystem. First and foremost, use Twitter to communicate; and, although high follower counts may indicate genuine popularity, they can be gamed and don’t necessarily indicate importance or quality. Laura goes so far as to say, “The most important, influential person in your Twitter stream is you; be proactive about your life.”
Understanding your extended network
Twitter, by itself, can tell you only the number of people you follow and the number of people who follow you. As described in the previous section, those numbers give you just part of the story.
If 100 people follow you and communicate with you, then your actual extended network is much larger than 100 people because conversations relay messages and connect new people on Twitter. Say that Follower #86 has 1,000 followers. Whenever Follower #86 mentions your name, 1,000 people receive an update that contains your name. And you may find that kind of exposure quite useful. Twitter is an excellent way to “harness the power of loose ties” or benefit from friends of friends of friends who are more likely to know about things nobody in your social group knows.
If Boston-based Laura was trying to locate a venue in Nashville, Tennessee, to hold a Twitter marketing seminar, she might send an update that reads, “Trying to locate a good 700-person venue in Nashville to give a talk. A place to stay would be nice, too. Suggestions?” Because thousands of people read Laura’s Twitter stream, chances are good someone lives in Nashville. If any of those handful wanted to connect Laura with a local business owner, they might ask their own networks, who may have an answer based on their own geography. In this sense, Laura’s primary network gives her secondary access to all her follower’s networks, as well.
It’s pretty cool how friends of friends can end up becoming your direct friends, too. Say you’re following five friends, and two of them are constantly communicating (via @replies) with some other person whom you don’t know. Out of curiosity, you may start following that other person just to make sense of your friends’ conversations. Because you’re friends with two people that the other person talks to frequently, he follows you back. Now, all of a sudden, you have both a larger Twitter network and extended network.
Although finding new and interesting people in your Twitter network happens organically, the Twitter community has come up with a couple of tools to help grow your network in a way that’s relevant to you. You can browse interesting tags for people in the Twitter directory www.wefollow.com that Digg CEO Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) started in spring 2009, or the service www.MrTweet.com (@mrtweet), a program that combs your Twitter network and recommends new people for you to follow. In our experience, Mr. Tweet is pretty accurate in automatically finding people who are relevant in scope to what you talk about