We’re at http://converse.ly/

I’ll shoot you a DM. I’d love to hear some more of your thoughts about this. Thanks again!

I mostly look at the score – just paste the Twitter name in the box from the email and let Twitalyzer run. I obviously can’t do that with all my current followers – that would be possible with a screen-scraping script but it’s not worth the effort. Essentially I just unfollow existing followers if they get annoying.

“Overall, I don’t think enough of my friends have signed into Twitalyzer to give me significant analysis of my network.”

If you go into Twitalyzer and look at the control panel, you can actually see your “active” network. Generally, if you run into someone Twitalyzer hasn’t analyzed it a while, it will give you the option to update their score.

“So it’s interesting to me that having one number is important to you, and it sounds like “impact” is it.”

Actually, I’m far from a “one-number” person myself – I’m a mathematician and model builder. I like models and equations – ways to make predictions.

“What do you think about seeing the components of “impact” instead of a score, for example, the percentage or number of people who retweet you, mention you, and follow you.”

Twitalyzer can do this – in the earlier versions it was one of the default reports but they’ve added a lot of functionality since then. You can still do that if you want. Just go to the “Recommendations” page.

“We’re working on a way to do this and also show this on a tweet-by-tweet level, so you know which one of your tweets performed the best and then you can learn from there what makes a tweet that resonates with your followers. What do you think about that?”

It seems easy enough to do in theory, but I’m not sure how it would work in practice. I’ve been on Twitter a long time – I joined in early 2007, But I only really became active towards the end of 2008 and am primarily a Portland-area Twitter “persona” rather than someone attempting to build a “national” presence.

What’s the name of your tool?

Thanks for writing an extensive response about how you use Twitalyzer. I found it very helpful.

I have a hard time knowing where in Twitalyzer to go to look at my new followers and decide who to follow back. Do you know where? Overall, I don’t think enough of my friends have signed into Twitalyzer to give me significant analysis of my network.

So it’s interesting to me that having one number is important to you, and it sounds like “impact” is it. What do you think about seeing the components of “impact” instead of a score, for example, the percentage or number of people who retweet you, mention you, and follow you. We’re working on a way to do this and also show this on a tweet-by-tweet level, so you know which one of your tweets performed the best and then you can learn from there what makes a tweet that resonates with your followers. What do you think about that?

http://www.twitalyzer.com/definitions/Twitalyzer-Handbook.pdf

That used to be more prominently featured on their web site than it is now. But the key metric is impact – it’s an overall assessment of how well you’re doing. It’s the magical “one number” for those who must have one number.

Right now it’s saying my impact score is 7.3 percent. That might sound low, but below that it say that value is in the 92.8th percentile. What that means is that only 7.2 percent of the Twitter users in their sample have more impact than I do. The overarching goal would be to increase that value.

My goal for the past year has mostly been building a follower base. Twitalyzer helps me characterize my followers and decide which new followers I should follow back. Although there’s a lot of debate about this, *both* quantity and quality of followers are important. It *is* a numbers game – the more followers you have, the more conversations and retweets you will get, all other things being equal.

Twitter is a complex multi-dimensional network. In addition to the constantly-changing social graph, there are patterns in physical space and time. The last time I looked this morning, on a relatively slow Saturday morning Pacific Daylight Time, Twitter was collecting about 500 – 700 tweets per second. It’s much higher at certain times – I think the record during the World Cup was about 4,000 when the final match ended.

Awesome response! Do you think Twitalyzer gives you enough actionable metrics for you to act on? It seems very comprehensive with many different kinds of measures, however, it doesn’t really give you an easy way of understanding what are the most important measures and how you can improve those measurements. I get confused just looking at the amount of stats that the service spits out. How do you use Twitalyzer? What are your goals on Twitter and how Twitalyzer help you get there?

I can come up with a few more like Twitalyzer off the top: ad.ly/analytics , tweetreach, twitteranalyzer, tweetstats.

I think the currently available analytics services are doing an okay job because people were confused and these services help clarify what is going on. What’s lacking in these services is taking it a step further. Now what do these numbers mean, and how can users improve? This touches on what is the ROI that users are looking for from Twitter. Do you have another post that talks about that?

1. Everything I saw at Chirp and everything I’ve seen since tells me that Twitter is on a course to *clearly* differentiate itself from both Facebook and Google. They can’t hope to compete head-on with either of them.

2. I haven’t seen any indication that Twitter will give away analytics in the same sense that Google does. Twitter’s business model appears to be to *sell* advertising and analytics to partners like Starbucks, DisneyPixar and Coca-Cola. They have other partnerships with media companies – Oxygen, MSNBC, the New York Times and MSNBC.

3. Twitter has begun regulating the API call rate to attempt to alleviate the load caused by the World Cup traffic. My prediction is that once the World Cup is over, that regulation will remain in place. Moreover, once the oAuth capabilities are in place, I’m guessing that Twitter will *sell* higher API call rates than are “publicly” available. Almost since day one, they’ve offered “whitelisting” on a case-by-case basis but not charged for it to my knowledge. I think that’s going to go away.

I also saw that Smallthought was acquired by Twitter and the same thing jumped into my head “analytics for Twitter”.
See here for the blog post I have written on it : http://socialbits.net/blog/dabbledb-has-been-bought-by-twitter/

With Facebook, you get Facebook insights, you have Google analytics for your site or blog, you have insights for Youtube also.
Is it expected that Twitter should provide some sort of analytics for free also?
Or will Twitter charge for it?
If they do charge for it, what features will you get for your money?

Just the last point to throw in, one of Twitter’s features is that it is suppose to deliver breaking news, any time there is big news it can’t handle the news, you get “Fail Whale”. For instance it has been up and down since the start of the world cup.
If they try and layer analytics software into their existing architecture then will it crash more often?
And if it crashes more often are you willing to pay for it?