Love it or hate it, Twitter is officially here and it's officially BIG! You would have had to be living in a cave at the top of Everest to have missed some of the impacts the new(ish) social networking and micro-blogging service has made.
The latest news is that PR firm Edelman has launched, what they are calling, Tweetlevel. This aims to give you an idea of a Tweeter's influence on the service, without just relying on how many followers an individual or organisation has (in case you are interested; according to twitterholic.com the five most followed Tweeters are; Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, CNN and Barack Obama.
The highest ranked UK Tweeters are Coldplay at number 17 and Lily Allen at 31). Now this isn't the first such monitoring tool, we've already seen Waggener Edstrom's Twendz for example, but what this shows is that the communications industry are taking Twitter seriously enough to invest time and effort into producing these tools.
There was a great deal of criticism of Twitter in the beginning with questions as to why on earth it would be interesting to know what person X, was doing from one minute to the next, and yet the almost four million people following Ashton Kutcher can't all be wrong. While those at the top are still celebrities, and not actually companies, they are the new form of 'brand'.
Certain individuals wield a huge amount of influence on this platform, and it doesn't take long for followers to 'stand up' and support the latest issue from characters like Stephen Fry, whether it's a charitable cause or even a complaint against a newspaper. So it's probably right that the communications industry start looking at this service as not only ways for brands to, quite literally, 'communicate' but also as a new way to measure the support for a brand.
As reported on PR Week; Jonny Bentwood, director of analyst relations and strategy at Edelman said "We looked at different things that actually measure importance on Twitter" and according to Bentwood, Edelman actually worked with Twitter on the platform, which allowed them to access the social network's API (application programming interfaces) to build an algorithm that calculates importance. So essentially, this tool ought to be getting right to the heart of the service to evaluate who is on top in terms of influence.
Looking at the tool itself (www.tweetlevel.edelman.com) it's very user friendly and even allows you (it's free and open to the public - well done Edelman!) to search by popularity, trust, engagement and influence, depending on how you want your results prioritised. Kutcher does make an appearance in a few of the other searches (trust and influence) but the other most popular Tweeters are surprisingly absent from those lists, instead we see PerezHilton and mashable making the top five.
What is most interesting is that the top five according to engagement are all different, in fact it seems that a couple of actual companies have made it into the list - it goes to show there are a few businesses using Twitter the 'right' way.
What does this all mean for Twitter? The reality is that the service is still in its infancy (some suggest that the next big thing will be a Twitter/You Tube combination) but this should not detract from its obvious influence and impact on the public and of course on the communications industry - Twitter is here to stay.
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