Introducing Tweerank, The Definitive Engagement Score for Twitter

A few days ago pal Robert Scoble wrote a very interesting and somehow provocatory post on the lists of users that Twitter suggests by default to new users.

He points out (and he’s definitely right) how these lists don’t make much sense since many people who actually did something important during their life didn’t make those lists. He also underlines that the number of followers should be turned off from any Twitter user profile and that there is the need of an “engagement score” that measures how a user is engaging on Twitter, regardless of the number of followers.

Turn off follower counts for everyone and come up with a new “engagement score” that is more focused on how you use Twitter and how people engage with you. That’s more important anyway than how many followers you have, especially since so many followers are lurkers at best or bots and spammers at worst.

Today I’m happy to introduce the Tweerank. Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t work on it after Robert’s post, but i is the result of 6 months of research on how Twitter works and indexing the behaviour of Twitter users.

The Tweerank is the base of other services like Tweefind, Tweepfind and (more or less) Tweefight. For example, when you make a search on Tweefind, results are shown according to the Tweerank of the users involved in that search.

Since the first launch of Tweefind at the beginning of April this year and the first official announcement by Mashable, the algorithm which Tweefind is based on has got better and better and has been refined in order to offer a very reliable picture on how engaging a Twitter user is. The algorithm works 24/7 analyzing the Twitter stream and updates the ranking of any user accordingly.

Tweerank takes into account 28+ parameters, weighed depending on various factors. For example the number of times a user gets retweeted, the number of times he/she retweets something, the number of unique people whose tweets he retweets, the number of unique people who retweet a user’s tweet in a certain amount of time, followers/friends ratio, average number of tweets per day and many others.

Over 4 Million Twitter users have been ranked so far and today we are offering the ability to use the Tweerank engine directly. Just put a Twitter username on the main box and you’ll immediately get the current Tweerank (I say current because it gets updated daily).

You can also take a badge and put in in your blog or website, it will be updated weekly if relevant changes are detected.

If you play with it a bit you would find interesting facts. There are lots of very, VERY interesting twitter users who are not Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears and who are far from having their followers but who have a much higher rank, since they engage active chats with other users, share a lot of interesting content and people re-tweet their content very often.

At this point, a question arises: ok, you are an actor/ singer/ popular person and I decide to follow you on Twitter, but, at the end of the day, are you actually interesting on Twitter? Very often the answer is: NO.

Here are a few examples (rank calculated on Oct. 2nd):

- Scoble’s rank is high, but I took one of the people he mentioned in his post (Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder) and, despite we are talking about a very well known and popular man, his rank is quite low.

Moreover, we (tech geeks) tend to look for influential people among the well known Scoble, Le Meur, Arrington and so on, but there are lots of non-techies people who have much higher ranks and cover subjects very far from technology.

Here is an example, Ray Beckerman, who ranks among Top 10 and he tweets about “law, social justice, nature, human & animal rights, arts, ecology, indie music & film”.

I also wanted to point out that many other “famous” people in the tech industry are not necessarily influential/engaging/active on Twitter. Look at the Twitter founders: @ev has rank 61.72 and @biz has rank 54.93. Not much, if compared with less “popular” tweeps who are using Twitter way better. Well, it just reflects ther actual activity. Just 4600+ tweets since the launch of Twitter and @biz has over 1000 less. So, despite they are undoubtely VIPs in the field of technology, internet and microblogging, they don’t use Twitter in a way their followers can enjoy it.

One more thing. Twitter accounts of popular magazines/blogs are limited since most of the times they are one way only. In those accounts you just find a link to a new story/post but those are “passive” accounts, don’t interact with other users. For this reason, while those are certainly interesting and influential accounts, they can’t get a very high rank because of the lack of engagement in chats, discussions and so on.

Conclusion

If you are on Twitter, I highly encourage you to check your Tweerank. If you think there is something wrong in it and want to leave recommendations and suggestions, please leave a comment, tweet it or just drop me a line…. and, of course, pur a badge on your blog and spread the word!

Tagged as: tweerank