Twitter for Dummies (28 page)

Measuring influence

While you start to gain a foothold within communities on Twitter, you might want to get a sense of what your network looks like and how far your updates travel.

As you read, please bear in mind that some of the less measurable results are the most important. The most important thing to measure is the thing you’re actually trying to accomplish, not just numbers for numbers’ sake. Are you meeting new friends? Finding new business leads? Sharing information widely about issues important to you?

Do your messages spread? In her keynotes, Laura argues that messages can be much more important influencers within Twitter than influential accounts and individuals, because good messages get repeated. A truly great message, even if it starts in quiet little corners of Twitter among people with small following networks, will echo and get repeated until eventually it reaches much of the network.

Twitter itself has a very primitive way of measuring your reach: You have following and followers counts. Although those numbers would seem to provide a good baseline for understanding how far your updates go and to whom, they don’t say much about what types of people follow you and how influential those followers are. In response, the Twitter community has developed a number of tools to help gauge and measure influence and reach. Less ethical people aggressively boost their follower numbers, sometimes through questionable habits like following people just until they follow back and then dropping them to go follow someone else. Important lessons? Don’t automatically trust an account with a really high number of followers. Don’t build your network around high numbers at the cost of high relevance and high engagement.

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 and what your network looks like. Give it a try!

Keeping Your Tweets Authentic

Because of the frequency and personal nature of what people share on Twitter, any twitterer absolutely must be genuine and real, whether she’s representing a business or tweeting as an individual. Joining Twitter as a private citizen is the route many users take, even if they have business to promote. Twitter is ideally suited for personal connection, and you can often more easily make yourself accessible and personable when you use Twitter as a person, not as your business.

Joining the conversation

You see the phrase “join the conversation” bandied about a lot on Twitter. If you’re representing a business, you can get a dialog going very easily: Just search for users who have mentioned your products or the types of problems you solve and follow them. If you have something relevant to say, engage them in conversation using the mention they made as a starting point.

We go over how businesses should approach using Twitter in Chapter 11, so read through it to avoid any complications or Twitter faux pas. Singling users out and asking them questions may be appropriate for some products, but that approach may be completely inappropriate for others. Twitter’s just another engagement point for your communications, marketing, and public relations, so know the rules of the road before you start driving too fast.

If you’re representing a business, mentioning little-known facts or interesting things about what you do or sell can start a conversation. You can also talk about your staff; tell interested twitterers how you (or someone else) make what you sell; or take the easiest route of all and ask your fellow Twitter users what they think of your product or service, and how they think you can improve or expand.

Sharing links

By way of getting started, many new users start sharing links with a bit of commentary on their Twitter stream, as shown in Figure 10-5. For many users, sending a link provides a great way to get a commentary started about something you find interesting. Give it a shot and see what happens. Here are the basics for sharing links. (You’ll probably want to use a link shortener most of the time, though. Review Chapter 9 for a refresher on how to do that.)

1. Copy the link’s URL and paste it in the What Are You Doing? box.

2. Type a comment about the link in the What Are You Doing? box (either before or after the link).

3. Post your tweet by clicking the Update button.

Usually after you post the tweet, Twitter shortens the URL for you using TinyURL.

Some users post a lot of links — some users like to use RSS or other tools to automatically update their Twitter streams with links to interesting articles that they’re reading. Others just post links by hand.

Figure 10-5:
This update comments on a link and includes that link.