Noticed that some of my posts get “re-tweeted” a lot , maybe 30 or 40 times, in a short period, perhaps in an hour or so – that was the  case with my post on Top Twitter Tools tonight.  For a while, I have had a RSS Feed set up on @webmetricsguru  and can usually find out who’s messaging me or mentioning my handle, even after the fact, so that, yes, I can see every mention that way -

But … I’m wondering – who’s actually the most influential – who carries this conversation forward, after I’ve blogged about it.  In a few short minutes I found:

• @sharondille
• @LJMoritz
• @ElisaNavarette
• @socialmediainfo
• @marketingmoron
• @socialmediainfo
• @Igor_Simanovski
• @JamesLDaniels
• @tweetlessons
• @Mike_Cotton
• @tfollowers
• @roadmapp
• @JBanis
• @butch_murray

I used Mailana to figure out who might be the most influential – or who of these Twitter friends/followers started the re-treat of my post – so here’s  a map of conversations discussing “top twitter tools” http://bit.ly/XcpNz

It doesn’t appear that any of the people are connected to each other, according to Mailana – but I find that hard to believe.

At any rate, by using Mailana, I was able to get a map, pretty much in real time, of who was talking about my post – and had there been more interrelationships shown, perhaps figured out who was starting the re-treat, and I found a post about 4 ReTweet Tools and Trackers by Darron Rowse where he mentions the 4 tools

1. Dan Zarrella was one of the first and has come up with a number of tools including his ReTweet Mapper which among other things allows you to see a ranking of the most ReTweeted people on twitter (arranged by the last hour, day and week).
2. retweet radar – this tool describes itself as ‘Finding trends in the mountains of information ‘retweet’ed on Twitter.’ It puts together a retweet cloud of terms that are being retweeted, ranks most retweeted users of Twitter and ranks the links that are being retweeted.
3. Retweetist – similarly this service ranks the hottest links being retweeted and most retweeted people on Twitter.
4. Retweetrank – another tool that simply ranks the number of retweets twitter users have (not sure how up to date it is).

However, none to the tools above actually did what I wanted and honestly, what i have in mind is similar to BlogPulse’s Conversation Tracker - but for Twitter – look, maybe it exists, and I just missed it.

My original blog post does show up, but Blogpulse isn’t designed to track for Tweets – that’s the problem, and doesn’t seem to want to pick up shortened urls, either.