Analytics For Twitter Using Twitter Friends

Some peo­ple have com­pared Twit­ter Friends to Google Ana­lyt­ics in terms of track­ing what you do, even if you don’t know what you do. The aim of this post is to intro­duce you to a tool writ­ten by Benedikt Koehler.  This tool is Twit­ter Friends.

It’s goal is to point out who really mat­ters to you on Twit­ter, as well as show­ing you what you do when you are on Twit­ter.  How often you post, what kind of posts you post, and how often you reply to your followers.

The point of this arti­cle is to show you how you can use this infor­ma­tion to improve your­self, as well the expe­ri­ence of your followers.

What Do I Do?  Who Do I Talk To The Most?

Image by dain­san­doval

Twit­ter Friends can tell you who you speak to the most, and how often you reply to your fol­low­ers.  You will learn which fol­low­ers you talk to the most, and how many peo­ple you talk to on a daily basis.  You will learn your habits (how often do you tweet? what are your tweets usu­ally?  replies, links, text?) and with this arti­cle, maybe improve.

Intro­duc­ing Twitter’s Three Networks

Benedikt’s tool, helps you see who is really rel­e­vant to you.  Accord­ing to him, there are 3 dif­fer­ent kinds of net­works on Twitter.

• The NETWORK — which is the group of peo­ple you fol­low or have fol­low­ing you
• The FOAF-NETWORK — This is the extended reach of your net­work (the fol­low­ers of your followers)
• And The @-CROWD — which is what Benedikt refers to as “The Hid­den Net­work”, these are the peo­ple you find your­self talk­ing to or reply­ing to the most.  This is the part this tool helps to shed light on.

How Twitter-Friends.com Works

With­out get­ting into the sci­ence of how Twit­ter Friends works, the tool searches your user­name, the num­ber of friends, and the num­ber of friends with @ replies over the last 30 days.  It then ana­lyzes that data and presents it to you. Whats nice is, you do not need to sign in with your user­name and pass­word (you do to get more detailed results, but that is not nec­es­sary).

When you visit Twit­ter Friends, input your user­name and click go. The tool takes lit­tle time to fetch the data and present it to you. For this exam­ple I’m using Kevin Rose from digg as an exam­ple (he is a much more active tweeter than I).

When you type in your name, or some­one else’s, you can see their rel­e­vant net.  In this case Kevin’s is 25. Here is a brief break­down of the most impor­tant stats

• The rel­e­vant net (out­go­ing) is the num­ber of users that you replied to in the last 30 days (more than once).
• The size of rel­e­vant net (incom­ing) is the num­ber of users that replied to you more than once within the last 30 days.
• Fans are the peo­ple who replied to you within the last 30 days
• Tweets Sent / day — this shows how many tweets you send a day
• Replies sent  a day - this is how many replies you send a day
• Con­ver­sa­tion Quo­tient shows you how many of your tweets are replies, the higher this num­ber is, the more you are hav­ing one-on-one con­ver­sa­tions with a spe­cific user, if your num­ber is low, it means you tend to talk to all your friends (or respond via direct messages)
• The Link Quo­tient shows how many of your tweets include links.  So if you are send­ing out a lot of tweets with links, this shows up here.

The graph to the side lets you com­pare users.  it can be fun to see how you stack up with some friends, and see if you are more con­ver­sa­tional or not.

So What Can I Do With This Data?

Now that you can ana­lyze your data, and see your habits, here are a few things you may wish to try and imple­ment. You can start @replying more.  This is some­thing I per­son­ally need to do more of, I tend to DM peo­ple opposed to @ reply­ing, so maybe I will @reply more. Since you can see how many tweets you send a day, maybe you want to add more tweets.

If you are not reply­ing as much per day, try reply­ing more. If you have 10k fol­low­ers, and you reply to about 10–15 of them a month, maybe you want to try and start engag­ing more of your fol­low­ers in con­ver­sa­tions and see­ing what they are doing. If all you do is send out links, maybe you want to mix in some @ replies so you have a more sta­ble rela­tion­ship between with LQ and CQ.

Ana­lyt­ics For Twit­ter Video

I labeled the video, Find Out Who Mat­ters To You On Twit­ter, because with Twitter-Friends you will see who you talk to the most, who talks to you the most, and how often you inter­act with your users.  This is the most impor­tant thing for me.

This is a great way to see if you’re ignor­ing some­one or if some­one is really try­ing to get your atten­tion, and you ignore them (acci­den­tally).  See­ing what kind of tweets you tend to tweet, and how often, are just bonuses for me.

Con­clu­sion

I hope you have found this arti­cle help­ful, and I encour­age you to check­out Twit­ter Friends.  Feel free to leave a com­ment below, and I encour­age you to share this link with as many of your friends as you can, that way we can all be bet­ter twitterers.

Tagged as: Analytics For Twitter, Tweet Stats, Twitter, Twitter Stats, Twitter Tool, Twitter Video, Twitter-Friends, Video on Twitter