Twitter respect ratio for science
science Friday, November 13, 2009 . This is a SciScoop post by David Bradley
Okay. I created a table based on a novel metric for Twitter users in which reach for a particular user is given as the percentage of times listed over follower count. This puts a whole new slant on the top-ranked scientwists with 2000+ Twitter followers that I cited earlier in the week.
No metric is perfect, this is better than raw follower count, however, as spammers and bots are not (yet) adding people to lists. So, it genuinely reflects some level of engagement or reach within the twitterhood. However, I suspect that the more SEO and tech savvy users who have lots of followers with a similar mindset will find that they are getting listed more than others and so have a better respect ratio. Indeed, the likes of Stephen Fry and Ashton Kucshcshter with their millions of followers have only fractional respect ratios. But, that’s c’lebs for you.
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7 Responses to Twitter respect ratio for science
Aaron
November 13th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Perhaps this ratio can be tweaked by looking at the people listing you.
There are two types of listers, one lists *everybody* they follow, so a listing from them is not worth much.
Then there are some who list only a subset of people they follow.
It is an honor to be listed by a guy who follows 500 people but lists only 50 people, compared to a guy who follows 500 people but lists almost all of them.
The smaller subset of followers being listed, the more highly respected you are by the person who listed you. In many cases, this subset is probably a replication of “special/super interesting/must see groups” the person has setup on Tweetdeck etc.
Stuart Clark
November 13th, 2009 at 11:35 am
So, Although I only have 557 followers, I should be happy because they have put me on 70 lists, making a respect ratio of 13%. So, it’s not how many followers you have, it’s how you engage them that counts! Cool.
@DrStuClark
Jim
November 13th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Hmm, by this reckoning I have a respect ratio of of 18.
Waddell Robey
November 13th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
I am all for following and respecting the scientific community, but I am intensely interested in prying loose the little bit of science that resides within all of us. Stimulating and encouraging that interest is the stable public support that science needs to progress and to also serve us all.
I also am eager to encourage those in the scientific community to discard their natural caution, which is considered as aloofness, when talking with laypeople. It is what I call the Feynman principal which can produce both public understanding and laughter even on such topics as the structure of a proton or the mysterious behavior of the Higgs Boson.
David Bradley
November 13th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
As readers will have already spotted there are several flaws in this kind of metric, beyond those mentioned above. For instance, it doesn’t give any kind of useful measure for people with just a few followers who happen to be listed by all their friends. Some tweeps have suggested incorporating follower and followed ratio, but that still doesn’t get around this problem. The list above looked only at those scientwists with more than 2000 followers to try and compensate.
A proper respect metric would somehow incorporate level of follower/followed engagement, retweet ratios, the number of hat tips (HT), how many vias, and how many original posts, links, and scoops a user was producing. So, if anyone wants to create a complete algorithm to do that…
Ryan Rancatore
November 14th, 2009 at 1:42 am
David,
Cool to see someone put my little metric to the test (flawed or not, which it definitely is). The ease in which someone can manipulate their own social media stats definitely necessitates a quick “eyeball test”. My metric is mainly to point out that an absolute # of followers or # of lists is, by itself, a poor judge of a tweeter’s worth. As you mention – not perfect, by any means. But a small improvement.
Twitter awareness/engagement ratio: a pedestal or a pillory for pharma? « STweM
January 8th, 2010 at 7:29 am
[...] conversation reminded me of a post by David Bradley on SciScoop last November shortly after the launch of Twitter lists wherein David divided the number of lists [...]