{"id":3766,"date":"2018-07-11T14:51:05","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T21:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/?p=3766"},"modified":"2018-07-11T14:51:05","modified_gmt":"2018-07-11T21:51:05","slug":"a-new-free-tool-to-determine-the-true-influence-of-a-twitter-account","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sparktoro.com\/blog\/a-new-free-tool-to-determine-the-true-influence-of-a-twitter-account\/","title":{"rendered":"A New, Free Tool to Determine the True Influence of a Twitter Account"},"content":{"rendered":"

Number of followers is a crap metric.<\/p>\n

And yet, as I’ve been watching and learning from folks who do content marketing, PR-focused outreach, social media marketing, and influencer campaigns, I’ve found that more than 90% of the time… that’s *exactly* what people use. They’ll nod their heads and say “yeah, I know it can be gamed,” or “yeah, some people still buy followers,” or “yeah, but what else is out there?”<\/p>\n

So… darn… frustrating.<\/p>\n

Here’s an example: my wife Geraldine runs the Twitter account @everywhereist<\/a>. She has a respectable 72,517 followers. I run the Twitter account @randfish<\/a>, which has 413,696 followers. From those numbers, you might assume that an average tweet sent from @randfish reaches ~5.17X as many people as a tweet sent from @everywhereist. That assumption is dead wrong<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In fact, oftentimes it’s the case that @everywhereist’s tweets reach more people, get more engagement, and have a much larger number of impressions than a tweet sent from @randfish. If you were, in fact, trying to determine which account you wanted to send a broadly-targeted message from in order to maximize the impact, choosing @randfish, simply because that account has 5.17X as many followers, would be a bad decision.<\/p>\n

That frustration led my cofounder, Casey, and I to build a new, free tool: SparkScore<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

SparkScore is entirely free because our goal with it isn’t to make money directly, but rather to hopefully build some credibility for SparkToro as a company that produces high quality, more transparent, more reliable scoring systems for measuring influence. Longer term, as we build out our paid product<\/a> (which is still 9-12 months away), we’ll be expanding and improving upon SparkScore, supporting more networks, and (hopefully) becoming a standard that many folks who need to compare the *true* influence of Twitter accounts can use.<\/p>\n

Using our previous example of @everywhereist and @randfish, you can see that SparkScore correctly identifies the @everywhereist account as having more reach and influence:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We’ve also tried to make the scoring system as transparent as possible, so you can see how we calculate the scores (for example, we do use follower count as ~1\/3rd of the overall score, because we’ve found it does correlate, albeit imperfectly, to total reach+influence):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Our final innovation is the one I’m most excited about — Engagement Score<\/strong>. This metric shows how relatively engaging an account’s tweets are, given its followers. No surprise that @everywhereist is incredibly high on this scale; that’s a big part of what makes that account’s SparkScore bigger than @randfish. And it shows that we’ve found a way to help address the catalyzing issue for the tool’s creation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The tool isn’t perfect — this is a first version. But it’s already giving us useful results, and we hope it can be useful for you, too. Give it a spin, let us know what you think, and stay tuned for improvements. Oh, and if you find it truly valuable, it would mean a lot to us if you shared it with your Twitter friends \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Number of followers is a crap metric. And yet, as I’ve been watching and learning from folks who do content marketing, PR-focused outreach, social media marketing, and influencer campaigns, I’ve found that more than 90% of the time… that’s *exactly* what people use. They’ll nod their heads and say “yeah, I know it can be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-startups"],"yoast_head":"\nA New, Free Tool to Determine the True Influence of a Twitter Account - SparkToro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Number of followers is a crap metric. 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