{"id":628,"date":"2008-06-27T10:49:58","date_gmt":"2008-06-27T02:49:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/?p=628"},"modified":"2008-06-27T10:49:58","modified_gmt":"2008-06-27T02:49:58","slug":"twitter-metrics-are-a-complete-waste-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/social-networking\/twitter-metrics-are-a-complete-waste-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter Metrics Are A Complete Waste Of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had a twitter conversation with <a title=\"toprank blog\" href=\"http:\/\/www.toprankblog.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">TopRank Online Marketing<\/a> CEO Lee Odden about the launch of WebProNews&#8217; new Twitter directory\/indexing service <a title=\"twellow\" href=\"http:\/\/www.twellow.com\" target=\"_blank\">Twellow.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/images\/blog0806\/twellow.com.jpg\" alt=\"twellow\" width=\"450\" height=\"433\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Great things about Twellow:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Categorizes twitter streams by vertical\/niche, eg: automotive, movies, blogging, news<\/li>\n<li>Groups related twitterers together<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s offset by one major flaw, which unfortunately is tied to Twitter&#8217;s current state of development &#8211; analytics don&#8217;t mean much more than a brute force &#8220;followers&#8221; number.<\/p>\n<p>The higher the number of followers, the higher you&#8217;ll rank in the results, with the net effect that <a title=\"robert scoble\" href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/Scobleizer\" target=\"_blank\">Robert Scoble<\/a> is ranked first with 28,000 followers, followed by <a title=\"jake marsh\" href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/jakemarsh\" target=\"_blank\">Jake Marsh<\/a> with 12,000, in the blogging category.<\/p>\n<p>The results are limited by the enrollment of your twitter feed into the system for benchmarking and indexing.<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;m having serious doubts about using followers as the determining criteria.<\/p>\n<p>Could social networks be <!--more-->the new playground for blackhat marketers?<\/p>\n<p>In the initial stages of Yahoo MyBlogLog&#8217;s launch, I know of a number of programmers who automated the creation of new profiles and artificially inflated community sizes and went out to spread spammy marketing messages.<\/p>\n<p>With the current state of Twitter development, what&#8217;s to stop marketers from either automating or farming out the creation of a horde of twitter followers, thereby artificially inflating the size of their community.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not secret that a forum with 100,000 registered members with 5-10 active users is pretty much dead. What about a twitter account with 50,000 inactive followers?<\/p>\n<p>I wonder if Twitter will enforce a minimum activity threshold (a number of twitters sent out within a set time interval) like some webmail providers have instituted to continually prune dead and inactive accounts.<\/p>\n<p>Will Twitter be able to present useful stats in the future? Likely, but not in the near future as they&#8217;re still coping with growing pains and the resource overhead of third party Twitter API calls, to the extent that pagination (an archive of your twitter conversation) and &#8220;replies&#8221; (twitter messages that you have received) have been disabled.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>It could be a while before we see Twitter metrics evolve to comprehensive display the time visitors are spending reading your updates (ie stickiness) and clicking through to your links (conversion?).<\/p>\n<p>Till then &#8220;followers&#8221; could be a proxy for a twitter popularity contest (traffic quality is a big question mark).<\/p>\n<p>Tread lightly. A conservative approach can do more to preserve your social goodwill, rather than making rash experimental stabs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had a twitter conversation with TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden about the launch of WebProNews&#8217; new Twitter directory\/indexing service Twellow.com. Great things about Twellow: Categorizes twitter streams by vertical\/niche, eg: automotive, movies, blogging, news Groups related twitterers together It&#8217;s offset by one major flaw, which unfortunately is tied to Twitter&#8217;s current state of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[72],"tags":[1390,270,227,566,269,1392,92,1391,611],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}