Twitter Scorecard for Publishers
Thu, 05/21/2009 - 13:16
Recently Publisher's Weekly published an article The Twitter Scorecard that showed which Publishers were using Twitter. I found the piece missing key elements that would provide more insight to their question "So who is twittering, and how effectively?" I believe that if you are asking how effectively we are using Twitter, there is considerable more data needed than was presented. In my opinion, the number of Followers is not a complete measure of effectiveness. In fairness, PW did not say they were attempting to be comprehensive or complete in their scorecard, so I thought I would provide the data that is available mixed with some of my own obtained by scraping. So, I'll attempt to fill-in the scorecard a bit more.
First a note on who is behind the publisher accounts. O'Reilly as a company has oodles of Tweeters who blog about work, life, interests, etc., including @timoreilly who is nearing the half-million followers threshold. I suspect other publishers have the same army of tweeters too, but the data below is is just for the publisher account only. Oftentimes, these sort of accounts are run by PR groups in a Publishing company.
Below, you will find the same list of publishers contained in the original article with the addition of the following column headers and data:
Pub_Twitter is the Publisher account on Twitter. This list was created by PW and am not sure what the criteria was. Followers is the number of people that are following the publisher. These numbers are already off as many of these publishers have added many new followers since the original writing. I kept the same number that PW reported. Following is how many users the publisher follows.
Updates is how many tweets the publisher has posted since the account was created. Content is the most popular words the publisher uses in their tweets. Url is a link to a wordle that visualizes the corpus of tweets for the publisher. At the bottom of the table, you will see All Publishers which shows averages and the link includes all words in a visual wordle.
Pub_Twitter
Followers
Following
Updates
Content
URL
1,581
390
495
Book,
New, Read, RT
1,809
1,813
257
Book, ChetTheDog , Dog, New
1,987
1,125
244
Blood,
Page, Free, Literary
5,003
5,296
4185
Green, RT, Thanks, Book
2,176
0
0
---
1,057
622
137
Lost,
RT, Pygmy, New
516
387
16
Book,
Check, Mason, tinyurl
3,726
3,004
671
Thanks,
RT, Book, UR
268
59
297
Wetlands,
Hely , Books, tinyurl
2,187
159
776
Harlequin,
Romance, Author, Free
805
459
149
RT,
Book, Story, Read
@LittleBrown
5,999
6,238
1359
RT,
Author, Scarecrow, Book
7,340
3,640
2073
O'Reilly,
RT, New, Book
678
834
182
Announced,
List, Best, Times
892
162
58
Forgot,
New, Tin, Books
3,995
2,056
1525
Post,
Tor, Blog , New
1,643
1,278
237
RT,
Tonight, Book, New
783
448
348
Vintage,
Book, Read, Books
1,485
562
174
RT,
Book, Great, Books
All Publishers(avg)
2,312
1,502
694
I am thinking of making this a quarterly scorecard for 2009. Before I do that, are there meaningful and obtainable measures you would like to see added to the scorecard? What are the real measures: Sales increases? Information disseminated more efficiently and targeted? Increasing the feeling of community? What elements do you think should be measured in a Twitter Scorecard? Finally, if you are a publisher using Twitter and want to be included in future scorecards, let me know. I am mikeh {at} oreilly {dot} com or @mikehatora on Twitter.
