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Profiling Twits

So here’s someone following you; out of the blue.

Who is this? You don’t recognize them. Why is someone from Mukinbudin in Western Australia following you?

Should you care?

You want to know if this person fits your profile of your twitter crowd.

And to know that you have to know the profile of your Twitter crowd.

If you were able to identify those followers/following that you’d like to see blossom into better relationships, then you might be able to create a profile, or template, into which they fit.

If you could create such a profile, then you could test whether a new arrival fitted that profile, and hence, whether you should follow them.

What are the basic characteristics of a Tweeter?

(1) How many Tweets have they issued?

(2) How many are the Following?

(3) How many Followers have they?

(4) How often are the Listed?

Then there’s

(5) Their geographical location

(6) Whether you’ve previously established contact (face-to-face, eMail, technical forums and so on)

and so on.

Here’s what you can do:

You can harvest some quantitative stats about your current bevy of Followers and Following, and use a spreadsheet to analyze them.

I did that; it’s easy.

There *IS* a subjective part of this, so it’s not a wholly-mechanical process of weeding out potentially good twitter prospects, but it cuts out the bulk of the chaff.

Observations 1 : 

First off I recognized that of my current 45 Following and 34 Followers, some were bound to be special.

In particular, over the past six months I have made conscious decisions to follow some people who have elected to follow me, and I’ve weeded out some of my mistakes.

I started by assigning a score of 100 (percent) to any person who as both a follower and a followed. “There must be a reason for this”.

Observations 2 : 

A basic question for me is “Who should I be nurturing” as a fellow-tweeters? Who are the people with whom I want to build a warm-and-fuzzy?

Observations 3 : 

For any individual who I’d like to upgrade to a Following, I need only look at the most recent dozen tweets they’ve made to see if I am prepared to reply or ReTweet at least one of them. Or take some sort of action. (Visiting a web site referred by them and gaining knowledge from that web site means that the original tweeter is a potential channel of useful data)/

Observations 4 :  

We’ve all been followed by a robot. Bots are fairly easy to recognize: A low number of tweets relative to their Followers and Following. In deed, the number of Followers and Following are within about one percent of each other, in the tens of thousands, and at least a hundred times greater than their number of tweets.

Observations 5 : 

In recording, one morning, the figures “tweets”, “followers”, “following” and “lists” of my clan, I was making a static photograph of their status, which is different from measuring them two or more times over a period. The latter approach would be a dynamic movie, and would give me an idea of growth. (med: A PHOTO of a girl lets you say she is pretty, but a MOVIE lets you say she is attractive)

Observations 6 : 

Is the person a reweeter? I’m not sure of a precise cut-off point, but if I see that one in ten of someone’s tweets are retweets, then there’s a chance that they will be happy to retweet me.

But if I see ZERO retweets, then they are not in the business of spreading-the-word.

Observations 7 : 

Who of my Followers am I NOT following? I need to visit their tweet list, their blog, their web page and see if I should be nurturing them.

With this in mind, let’s have a look at the spreadsheet.

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