farfromfearless
Twitter Grader: are you the bird outside my bedroom window waking me up every morning?
In case you’re not hip to the grove, Twitter is a platform which, in its purest form, gives you a voice to tell others “what you are doing”. Although as of late it has evolved into a great way to share ideas, promote your business, share links (thanks to sites like tinyURL.com) etc. Reciprocally you can “follow” people and be provided with a concise feed that tells you what others in your network are doing, reading, promoting… and so on. Bottom line its a great way to stay “in the know”, that is of course, if your Twitter account is “optimised”.
What? Optimised? Like my website? How the heck do I do that?!?!
Great question. Twitter is one of those things that you don’t know how useful it is until you know how useful it is. As a Twitter newb, a chick to keep up the metaphor, you have the option of letting Twitter sift through your email contacts to find users to follow, this can lead to a dead end for many, myself included. Solution; as Twitter often ties in with many other 2.0 platforms and the “rockstars” of Twitter can be easily found across various platforms, keep an eye out for the @ symbol (indicative of a Twitter user name). Search twitter for your favorite blogger, company, or city. This will give you a good start as it did for me.
Great, I’m hearing tweets, reading twemes and surfing hash tags, I’m soaring, right?
Not necessarily. This is where Twitter Grader comes in. Thanks to our good friends at HubSpot we now have a tool to test the various metrics that will lead to your success on Twitter. Twitter Grader, like the famed Website Grader, puts your query, in this case your Twitter username, through a special sauce algorithm and assigns you a grade out of 100, although Twitter grader is much simpler, as is Twitter.
At first glance it doesn’t really tell you much that the twitter home page can’t, besides the “competitive intelligence” that is. What I take from it, besides my grade of 5, is that the more you tweet, the more people you follow, the quality of the people you follow, and the frequency and quality of the people who follow you will get you a better score. The better your score, the more involved you are in the community and the better chance you have of getting the most out of Twitter.
Homework:
- Get on Twitter (hopefully you already are)
- Check your score http://twittergrader.com
- Find users who are relevant to you, i.e. favorite bands, bloggers, SEO geeks.
- Learn about different tricks of the trade, i.e. hashtags. For a good sense of some of these, check out the Twitter posts on Union Street Media’s Blog.
- Keep on Keepin’ on
- Check your score http://twittergrader.com
- and so on…
4 people have left comments
G. Dewald said:
Not sure that I would consider Twitter Grader a metric for your success using Twitter just yet. It’s more of an indicator of how complete your profile is plus an index of your activity and follower/following ratio.
For now the only way I might use Twitter Grader (beyond having fun with it, of course) is to perhaps grade the value of someone using TwitAd or something. But even then…
Of course, it’s still in Alpha and I don’t yet know what a TwitterGrade might be relevant for (other than fine fine marketing for hubspot). Unlike Website Grader which catches all sorts of due-diligence issues with website construction.
I guess the big questions are: What action do you take based on your Twitter Grade? What end result are you hoping to achieve for which a high Twitter Grade is relevant?
Grace said:
I like how Twitter Grader offers the ability to track your engagement, it’s not just on how “popular” you are. I did, however, notice that it only checks people against others who have already been graded…
Volpe said HubSpot launched this somewhat as a marketing tool like an alternative to advertising–>“We launched it because we have found that building interesting tools like this is a more effective marketing tool than doing advertising. Things like this get people curious and draw them in. We think that the site will build a lot of traffic quickly and cheaply, and we can promote other products and services there to generate leads and sales. This is similar to what we have done with Website Grader and Press Release Grader.” Valid point. Innovative, and simple.
Seems fun, could become an obsession for people wanting to climb to the top with their “Twitter mojo” but I still think it’s about being a part of your own community, sharing, and connecting. Score or no score.
Adam said:
You bring up some good points, and I asked myself the same questions when first introduced to the concept.
My take is that a high score isn’t just a high score, the score itself is not the issue but more what the score means.
For instance, Tweeter A doesn’t follow many people, he also isn’t followed by many people. The tweets he posts are mundane and contain few calls to action and/or useful information. No one is going to engage this User and this user is not going to feel very engaged, he may even question why he uses the service in the first place. Proportionately he would also receive a low grade.
Tweeter B however is following 1,434 people and has 1,387 followers, posts several times per day with calls to action/links/retweets etc, the people @B is following are also active Tweeters. This user would probably get a lot of relevant news/links from the feed and get good answers and responses to her tweets. Tweeter B would probably be very satisfied with the service have several success stories about it and would undoubtedly be straight up addicted. Guess what, she would also get a high score.
In conclusion the Grader is useful if you want to know what it takes to be more active and get more out of twitter. It is certainly not the end all be all and is not nearly as useful as the Website grader. But it does seem proportionate as twitter is much simpler than a standard website, just as the Twitter Grader is much simpler than Website Grader.
I do very much agree however, if you happy, great, who cares about a score, but if you think Twitter is lame, this might provide an insight.
G. Dewald said:
Yeah I guess I don’t think I need a score to know how “engaged” I am. However, it is useful for me to tell if one of my clients that I’m coaching is following through on their social media commitments etc.
Twitter Grader would be a pretty blunt instrument for measuring engagement at this step. Take Guy Kawasaki. When I first started following him it was a constant bludgeoning of updates to the Truemors site. Not long before I got off that train. But the quantity of those posts don’t map well to a qualitative concept such as “engagement.” Just because I keep handing you rings doesn’t mean we’re gettin’ married, if you catch my drift.
All that said, I think Twitter Grader is immensely fun. I probably will use it to “grade” clients who need coaching. And I’m sure they’ll make good calls regarding how to make it better at measuring engagement. But for now it will probably make an even more excellent case study in content-marketing.
- Copyright 2010 The Passenger. All Rights Reserved.
- Back To Top
- Home
Leave a Comment-