My Twitter mood is continuing these days. After a general post about twittering heights and a more technical one about hashtags in Twitter, today I’ll write a short review of one of the most useful applications you can try to enhance your Twitter experience.
The application is web-based and you can find it at mrtweet.net. MrTweet offers two simple, yet powerful features so far – the app is very young, 4 weeks at the date of this post, if I’m not wrong – and those are
- listings of your followers that you should follow back
- listings of the key influencers in your network
In order to measure the quality of the followers you should follow back and to define the “influencer” MrTweet uses a few ad-hoc metrics.  Based on what you already have in your network of followers, MrTweet will harvest a report, in fact, just a simple list. The report shows near each person their ratio of following / frollower, the number of tweets per day and the recipricity: how that person replies or not to non-follows. On top of that, it shows a list of the persons in your network who are already following that person, and, if you really want to know more, it also shows you the latest tweets of that person in your browser. And of course, if you like the guy, you can follow him on Twitter from within MrTweet website.
Ok, enough with features, let’s see how this works. First of all, you need to follow MrTweet account, ususally found here: http://twitter.com/mrtweet. After you follow him, you’ll receive a direct message with instructions on how to view your generated reports. What happens in between: the MrTweet application will harvest your contacts in Twitter and generate a report on their site, mrtweet.net, with all the information you need. If you have a lot of followers or if you follow a lot of people, expect the report to be a little slow.
Here’s how the dashboard of my generated reports looks like (click to enlarge):
Here’s how my followers I should follow back screen looks like (click to enlarge)
And here’s how the influencer report looks like (click to enlarge):
So here’s where the interesting part is starting. You can see who are the key influencers you should follow in your network by looking at each and every person and examining those 3 metrics. Let’s take them one at a time.
Twitter Followers Versus Following
This is for me the most important criterion. The report is either sub-unitar, if the person follows more than he’s followed by, either supra-unitar if he has more followers than persons he follows. I always try to find persons with a supra-unitar ratio to follow because they do have a larger audience and they supposedly have a lot to say. But the decision has to be taken on the spot and you must judge on each and every person. For instance, Jason Calacanis has a sub-unitar ratio, but he’s followed by more than 40.000 users. Which means in turn he follows more than 40.001 persons, right? That’s huge.
Number Of Tweets Per Day
You can see at a glance if this is a talkative or a more silent user. How many tweets per day are important if you are honest about following that person, (and you don’t try to abuse this tool in order to create a quick huge list of followers). If he has more than, let’s say, 10-15 tweets per day, that would be a problem. Your timeline will tend to become flooded by his tweets, pushing away tweets from more silent users. And if he has a less than 1 tweet per day, he’ll be lost in the bigger number of followers you already plan to have. So you must choose carefully.
Twitter Reciprocity
That’s either “usually respond to non-follows” either blank. I try to find people who are generally responding to non-follows because that means they are open to discussion. The true nature of Twitter relies in the way your social interaction is shaped and I usually look for people from whom I have a lot to learn. And who are also open minded and ready to engage in a conversation. So, if the guy appears to usually respond to non-follows I chose to follow him, regardless of the other two metrics.
At this moment, MrTweet is still in alpha and they do experience some hickups now and then, but the application is usable. And, most important, extremely useful. They also seem pretty open to suggestions so if you have any please tell them, and most likely you will hear from them.
All in all, MrTweet is an important step ahead in making Twitter a more easily to understand (and use) social networking tool.
