Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Twitter grader... yup!

I got a message from a new follower on Twitter today, telling me he had found me on Twitter Grader. I followed the link, entered my username (karynromeis) as directed and was presented with this:
It seems I am currently ranked 42,441 out of 2,289,735. Now I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but I suspect that, at the very least, you should probably be tugging your forelock about now! Apparently, I am a member of the Twitter elite in my county (how's that forelock?).

Most importantly of all, my grade is 98.3 out of 100.

D'you think this is like golf, or sprinting where a low number is better, or like a bank balance where a high number is better? I decided to try and find out by clicking on the handy 'How it Works' button just below my grade. That took me here.

Of course, they're not about to reveal their algorithm to us, so I still don't know how I came to have that score. What I do know is that the number of followers plays a role, something which the people behind the tool defend. I can't imagine that my meagre 600-odd followers counts for much when there are people with tens of thousands (perhaps even millions?) of followers. But this is just one factor. Other factors are:

  • power of followers - so the grade of my followers affects my grade. Not sure how they determine the grade of the followers in the first place, though - a bit chicken and egg, that.
  • frequency of updates
  • recency of updates
  • follower/following ratio - so if many people follow me, but I only follow a few, this counts in my favour. I can hear @josepicardo expressing indignation from here!
  • engagement - this refers to being retweeted, being @named and obviously, it matters what grade of twit retweets or @names you - to me, this may be the most valid measure.
It turns out the grade thing is like a bank balance, i.e. the higher the number, the better.

None of this helped me find out how @jobrich used the tool to find me. He seems to have found a lot of people that way. So I went back to the Twitter grade report page. On the top right hand side, are some links. One takes you to elite users in various locations. Perhaps @jobrich just searched for all the Twitter elite in the UK.

One very useful feature of the tool is that you can search for terms that are of interest to you. Once you have found out who tweets regularly about stuff that interests you, you can opt to follow them and widen your network.

1 comment:

V Yonkers said...

This reminds me a bit of my daughter's junior high class (in fact, perhaps we should call it the Jr. High algorithm) . If you are popular, others will "follow" you because they want to be graced by the popularity. As a result, they are more popular if they are the initiators rather than the "followers".

On the other hand, if you don't have any friends, then who will even notice you? It is even worse if you are one of those "cling-on's" or wannabes who follow around behind the "popular" kids.

I predict that those that wannabe will use this tool to find others. Those that don't really care will become more popular or less popular depending on whether others like what they say or do. And those that are the most popular will stay at the top as they gather more and more followers who follow base on ratings!