Twitalyzer: Twitter Analytics

With Twitter becoming one of the hottest websites on the web these days, it’s attracting a lot of developers to their open Application Programming Interface (API). And Application Programmers are really becoming creative and innovative as to what their applications can do. One such development that I find interesting is Twitalyzer. What it does is provide analytics (similar to Google Analytics) and gives you a ranking to how you stand in the twitter world. What’s great about it…

… is that it gives you a benchmark on how well you’re twitting. It measures your Twitter rank by the following criteria:

• Influence

• Your relative reach in Twitter, measured by the number of followers you have

• Your relative authority, measured by the number of times you are “retweeted”

• Your relative generosity, measured by the number of times you “retweet” others

• Your relative clout, measured by the number of times you are referenced by others

• Your relative velocity, measured by the number of updates you publish over a seven day period

• Signal

• • References to other people (defined by the use of “@” followed by text)
  • Links to URLs you can visit (defined by the use of “http://” followed by text)
  • Hashtags you can explore and participate with (defined by the use of “#” followed by text)
  • Retweets of other people, passing along information (defined by the use of “rt”, “r/t/”, “retweet” or “via”)

• Generosity

• Our measure of generosity is one’s propensity to “retweet” someone else, thusly creating awareness of their work and idas among your own followers. Specifically, our measure of generosity is based on the ratio of retweets you pass along to all updates you publish.

• Velocity

• Your velocity is simply the rate at which you contribute to Twitter. Since the Twitter Search APIs limit us to 1,500 records, at least for the time being, you are judged against a theoretical maximum of 1,500 updates per week.

• Clout
  • Clout is often thought of as “special advantage, pull, or influence” in the real world. In our usage, clout is the likelihood that other people will reference you in Twitter. The definition of clout is simply the number of references to you divided by the total number of possible references.

I find the analytics very interesting and very helpful at the same time, as it gives me an overview of my activities on Twitter. It also gives me line charts on the analysis of my Twitter activities. The algorithm for measuring one’s rank is also very justified and quite accurate in terms of benchmarking. I’m currently given a 0.1 influence, 100% signal, 0% Generosity, 0;8% Velocity, and 0% clout (now I have to find more things to retweet… by the way, you could follow me “francissimisim” on Twitter).

 

As Twitter is fast becoming one of the most powerful websites, having a twitter account that matters is important (as some would even pay for followers). And just like websites, it’s about Twitting better (content, retweets…) to gain followers on your Twitter. This website does a great job of doing analytics, and if they keep up and continuously update their functions, it won’t be long before they’re bought or investors investing in them (possibly an acquisition from Twitter itself). It’s a great website and I’ll be continuously be monitoring my Twitter acitivities from there.