Twitter Followers, Should We Have a New Metric?

(photo I took on the Great Wall)

It seems like at every tech conference or event the issue of how many twitter followers someone has always comes up…why?  I was interested to see that there is a teleseminar called “Twitter Masters” that’s going to take place in the coming weeks.  What strikes me as odd about the Twitter Master’s homepage is that underneath each speakers’ name is the number of twitter followers that they currently have.  However there is no mention of how many people that person is following.  A common courtesy on twitter (which I don’t follow) is to follow someone when they follow you.  See what I’m getting at here?  If you want a lot of twitter followers, then start following a lot of people, simple as that.  What this means is that you have to take the number of followers someone has and look at the context behind it.

Should twitter remove the number of followers from profiles?

Some people say yes, some say no.  I’m a bit undecided here.  However, I think that twitter can try testing other metrics instead of the follower count.  For example what if they created a ranking similar to Google Page Rank?  Go…

(photo I took on the Great Wall)

It seems like at every tech conference or event the issue of how many twitter followers someone has always comes up…why?  I was interested to see that there is a teleseminar called “Twitter Masters” that’s going to take place in the coming weeks.  What strikes me as odd about the Twitter Master’s homepage is that underneath each speakers’ name is the number of twitter followers that they currently have.  However there is no mention of how many people that person is following.  A common courtesy on twitter (which I don’t follow) is to follow someone when they follow you.  See what I’m getting at here?  If you want a lot of twitter followers, then start following a lot of people, simple as that.  What this means is that you have to take the number of followers someone has and look at the context behind it.

Should twitter remove the number of followers from profiles?

Some people say yes, some say no.  I’m a bit undecided here.  However, I think that twitter can try testing other metrics instead of the follower count.  For example what if they created a ranking similar to Google Page Rank?  Google doesn’t exactly tell you what your PR level means but you do know that it’s out of a 10 point scale so you have something you can approximate off of and benchmark from.  Twitter will have to do a bit of algorithm creation on their end but I think creating a type of ranking or popularity number will be quite effective for measurement.  They can include variables such as:

• number of retweets
• number of followers
• number of people they follow
• how many times they tweet a day
• how many links they send out a day
• etc.

All of these variables can be combined to create a persons twitter score or popularity metric that we can use instead of how many followers a person has, what do you think?

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