I guess someone had to do – start somewhere.  I read about it on Beth Kantor’s blog earlier today and in this post of hers – What’s Your Twitter Influence? Social Network Analysis of Your Twitter Network

The program is TWinfluence and I’m more interested in the “definations” part than the actual social media tracking – but I would like to see this type of analysis translated over to Facebook, and other Social Networks.    The problem with doing it on Twitter is that is so easy to have people that you know next to nothing about, following you, that I don’t feel there’s enough involvment or choice, to make the measurements as meaningful, in most cases as with other Social Networks where friending is more “deliberate”.

For example, First and Second Level nodes are applied to Twitter – the API makes it easy to track this, but again, how meaninful is the social capital you get from Twitter?

“….The Twitterer is the primary node (shown in red); its first-order neighbors (shown in green) surround it, and its second-order neighbors (shown in blue) surround the outside.

Given that Reach is defined as  the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers) and a measurement of potential audience and listeners that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.     It’s a simple concept, as far as it goes – I guess then, my Facebook “Reach” would be all my friends plus all their friends – and that could be interesting, in a way.

Velocity – I don’t put much stock in – mainly due to Twitter fatigue – but also because people will use something like Twitter, more frequently at some times over others and therefore, that’s going to effect the velocity.

Velocity averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence and is scored from “very slow” to “very fast” relative to other twitterers at your network size.

Also, there’s “Social Capital” which is a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves. Social Capital is scored from “very low” to “very high” relative to other twitterers at your network size.

Finally, there’s “Centeralization”, which is a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves. Social Capital is scored from “very low” to “very high” relative to other twitterers at your network size.

I think that have practical examples of each measurement would help to put the Social Media Metrics surrounding Twitter more meaningul and easier to apply.

Ok, so here’s some pratical examples.

Reach – If I want to reach out to influentials – it may make sense to find those that have the most reach, first, and try to sell them on my ideas – because they can then pass that information to their network (reach).  Again, I think this would be a lot more interesting if we had an analytics tool set and Facebook to play with – but OK, Twitter is a good place to start – and it gets me thinking about the reasons behind why I might be invited to some event by someone who has not yet friended me (I get those from time to time).

Velocity – well, I suppose Velocity is important for a political candidate – @barackobama , for example – the faster the audience (reach” grows, the better he’s doing (more or less).   But I don’t think Volocity is as meaningful for most of us – it depends on what you want to do with the information, what your goals are.

Social Capital might be the most important metrics that TWinfluence tries to map – I mean, not all friends are equal, and certainly, from a network node perspective, some friends are simply a lot more valuable than others.

I could go on more but I’ll stop here – point being – TWinfluence took a great first stab in coming up with Social Media Metrics – a lot more needs to be done – and I’m glad someone actually tried applying what the read and studied to real life.