» Tweetlevel - and a PR top 100 in ‘tweetlevel’ order.

The latest in our efforts to quantify the unquantifiable and reduce you to a mere number was launched yesterday. Yet again we brutalise complex human concepts like Trust, Popularity, Influence and Engagement with our over-simplistic (but pretty bloody clever) algorithms. With the Social Media Index (SMI) we did it to try measure ‘influence’ across a variety of social media platforms and now we have had a bit of a think about Twitter. Well, I say “we” but really I mean the fiendishly smart Jonny Bentwood.

Twitter is, as you know, the platform de-jour, but how do you begin to sort through it to find out who is important to you or your client? How can you use it better, particularly if it’s having an increasing role in how you manage relationships? To help us do this across all our Edelman teams and at scale (and dynamically as the twitterverse is developing and changing so rapidly) we have built a tool which we have been using for a while and which from today is open for use by anyone.

It’s called Tweetlevel. It looks at Twitter users four ways:

1. Popularity (how many people follow you – the easy one)
2. Influence (is what you say interesting and how many people listen to it)
3. Engaged (are you actively participating within your community – vs just broadcasting)
4. Trusted (do people believe what you say)

It does all this based on this formula (there’s always a formula or an algorithm or something):

The full methodology is at the bottom of this post. Crudely, though, this is how we come to those different weightings: