By Mike King
I’ve been playing around with Twitter ranking tools, trying to gauge how different Twitter users compare to others. Needless to say, finding a meaningful measurement tool is not that easy.
Some of the most well known ranking tools, like Twitterhollic and TwitterCounter just use the number of followers to rank Twitter users. While this is obviously one measure, it seems to me to be far too simplistic. If users in the wonderful world of Twitter are going to be ranked, other factors need to be taken into account such as quality of tweets, activity levels and credibility.
Fortunately, there are other sites that attempt to rank Twitter users with more sophisticated analysis than number of followers alone. Examples include Twinfluence and, my personal favourite, Twitter Grader.
These tools are very easy to use, just stick in any Twitter name and they will check it out and come back with a grade and, most importantly, an overall ranking. I have no idea how accurate these tools are or, frankly, much about how they work out their scores, but I like the way they attempt to bring some form of measurement to the world of Twitter. And, of course, with tools like Twitter Grader and Twinfluence, it is fun to be able to see where you come in the rankings.
When I checked it out, ‘johnsonkingPR’ was ranked 323,549 out of 2,927,968 on the Twitter Grader with an overall grade of 89 out of 100. Not bad, puts us close to the top 10% of Twitter users. By comparison, mega-Tweeter Stephen Fry comes in at 251 with a grade of 99.99 out of 100 and Guy Kawasaki at number 2 with a grade of 100.
Using Twinfluence, we faired even better, with an overall ranking of 76,783 and a score of 47%.
All of these ranking tools also have lists of the top Twitter users, the elite users. It all may be fairly meaningless but it is fun seeing where you stand in the rankings and then working to improve your position.
Thanks for the article. Glad that Twitter Grader is your personal favorite.
By the way, if you ever have ideas on how we might make Twitter Grader more useful for you, please do not hesitate to reach out.
Posted by: Dharmesh Shah | 31 July 2009 at 17:51