Are you a #twit when you #tweet? Measuring #Influence

Good article courtesy of NY Times David Leonhardt...follow the path to Twitalyzer.com to determine how much time you're actually wasting vs. actually influencing by tweeting.

A Better Way to Measure Twitter Influence

By DAVID LEONHARDT

Illustrations by La Tigre

Whether you’re a Twitter user like Lady Gaga (millions and millions of followers) or, say, me (2,600 and growing!), you’re always aware of roughly how many people follow you. It’s just how people keep score on the site and compare themselves with friends and colleagues.

But it turns out that counting followers is a seriously flawed way to measure a person’s impact on Twitter. Even one of Twitter’s founders, Evan Williams, made the point to me recently: someone with millions of followers may no longer post messages frequently, while someone followed by mere tens of thousands may be a prolific poster whose messages are amplified by others.

So who are the most influential people on Twitter? We asked the people at Twitalyzer, an independent research firm, to study the question, and they came back with something called the Influence Index. It counts the number of times somebody’s Twitter name is mentioned by other users (including retweets, which occur when one user rebroadcasts another’s message). The Influence Index doesn’t merely measure who’s talking on Twitter, but it also measures how much someone is affecting the conversation. Look below at how low Lady Gaga’s influence score is, for example.

Among the discoveries: It helps to come from one of the four countries where Twitter is most popular — the United States, Brazil, England and Canada. That may explain why there are three unfamiliar names, at least to most Americans, in the Top 10: Stephen Fry (a British actor), Luciano Huck (a Brazilian television star) and Rafinha Bastos (a Brazilian comedian).

Eric T. Peterson, the chief executive of Twitalyzer, points out that some of the most influential users also make a big effort to respond to much less famous people with personal messages. Kim Kardashian falls into this category. President Obama, as you may have guessed, does not.

One last thing: Twitalyzer’s public Web site doesn’t let people calculate their own influence scores. But you can get your impact score, which is a 0-to-100 index that combines influence, number of followers and frequency of message writing. To calculate that, type your Twitter name into the box here.