Measuring Twitter Influence

Twitter has become all the rage, and yet its value is still largely misunderstood. No research has clearly stated how well Twitter acts as an agent of your company, or whether using it as a marketing or customer satisfaction tool can provide you with the popularity boost you're looking for with your company. Ignoring the value issues, however, there is also the issue of influence – how much does your Twitter account influence the buying or interest patterns of your followers.

Many websites have attempted to create an influence score. This score is based on a number of different factors including, but not limited to: Retweets Number of followers Followers won/lost Engagement Using these metrics and others, these websites have developed numbers that indicate where Twitter handle ranks regarding things like influence and trust. These are nifty little tools, but do they work?

Influence tools are fun, but as far as whether they help indicate your Twitter handle's influence or popularity, the answer is no, probably not. There are many reasons for this. Some of them include: Retweeting as a Metric – Retweeting isn't the best way to judge influence.

That's because numerous Twitter accounts simply Tweet random quotes, make funny jokes, or actually ask their followers for retweets. Just because they do that doesn't mean that they're influencing buying behavior. Interaction as a Metric – When it comes to marketing, interacting with followers is probably important.

When it comes to influence, it probably isn't. How you interact with your followers has value from a customer satisfaction perspective, but not from an interest perspective. The content of the interaction can't be known, and some people interact to be friendly, not because you have influence over them.

Followers as a Metric – As a business, your followers can be anything. They can be other businesses. They can be spammers.

They can be people that want deals or are looking for a job. They can be anything. The number of followers you have is only half-important.

The quality of those followers is equally so. So there you have it. None of the items used to calculate your Twitter influence are that reliable, because they simply can't be.

If you are going to run a Twitter account for your business, don't worry too much about these scores. Take advice from experts and do the best job you can, and your Twitter account will be as influential as possible.