Scoring Your Social Media Efforts

The social media metric most often quoted, a person's follower count on Twitter, has always been pretty unsatisfying to me. Call me a skeptic but I just know deep down that not all followers are treated equal.

Your follower count doesn't tell me how likely those followers are to act on your message, propagate it beyond your follower list, or do anything aside from passively watch your message scroll by.

In fact, looking through the follower list of some of the larger political groups, I wonder how many of these ‘followers’ are nothing more than bots looking to get a return follow.

There have been some interesting academic papers on how to measure true influence in the social media world. And I've mentioned one of them below. But the first corporate product that takes an in-depth look at the user's followers is on the market so I thought I would give it a spin.

The company is called Klout. It’s a venture backed startup in the Bay Area. I'm not going to go into too much depth about how they generate their scores -- if you're really interested in the way the model works you can read more on their website.

http://klout.com/corp/kscore

In a nutshell, it assigns, on a daily basis, a 1 to 100 score to every Twitter account based on its analysis of the strength of that accounts followers. Is it perfect -- absolutely not. But it’s objective, far more useful than the raw follower count, and every account I've had scored returns a value that I think make sense.

So we've put together a demo project to apply this objective scoring model to as many campaigns, personalities and public policy groups as possible.

We call it the Social Media Scorecard.

We're currently scoring nearly 600 Twitter accounts -- from Presidential candidates to state parties to small 501(c)3’s. The scores are run nightly and are available at http://scorecard.activistmanager.com/ or http://act.am/sc.

So if you want to see where your social media efforts stack up against other’s check it out. If you would like to have your group added, or be listed as the manager of an account drop us an e-mail at scorecard@activistmanager.com.

The data is free to all so if you want to track your group's performance over time, or you're an academic doing a study of social media performance in this area let me know and I can send you the raw data sets.

Twitter @ActivistManager