I sat on Twitter for a long time lurking around and following people without a lot of feedback.  I didn’t get a lot of follows and couldn’t seem to make Twitter really work for me.  Well, a while back I found this cool service from Edelman called TweetLevel.  It helps gauge how well you use Twitter.

TweetLevel uses four categories to gauge an account: influence, popularity, engagement and trust.  Although Edelman is deliberately vague on how these are measured, as far as I can tell these loosely map to the following:

Influence: How many people retweet what you’re saying?
Popularity: How many followers do you have?
Engagement: How often do you reply to other people?
Trust: Similar to influence; how many people retweet you?

As with any analytics software, the secret formula to how these scores are generated is closely guarded.  However, I was able to learn something about my own Twitter use from these scores.  If you think of every tweet you make in the context of these four scores your use of Twitter will become more effective.  Twitter is about influencing those who choose to follow you.  It is about engaging with people and building trust.  Yes, it is about popularity.

I still have something to work on.  My TweetLevel stands at a 36, more than 10 points higher than where I started a couple months ago.  I hope to see that score rise as I raise my engagement from a lowly 5 points.  I’ll be looking for good articles to retweet and good conversations to join… something I should have been doing all along, right?  It took this site to make me see it.

Tags: Edelman, TweetLevel, Twitter