Favored, not Followers for Twitter Influence
The Electric Outlet has outlined how the shift in followers to favored tweets determines influence. And the best part is, there is a way to measure this through Google searches. Type the following in Google search:
site:twitter.com/*/favourites USERNAME (note the U in favourites)
You might need to click “repeat and include the omitted results” at the page bottom. Surprised by how high or low the number is? Well don’t worry too much – a lot of people don’t use the favorites feature to its full potential.
Are the results surprising?
Jayvee Fernandez has done his rounds in blog postings. He served as Technology Channel Editor for b5Media Inc and has founded the leading blog advertising and word of mouth network called BlogBank in the Philippines. And now, he's gone full circle, landing back with The Blog Herald, the resource that gave him his first blogging job in 2005.
This is clearly a better option than determining influence based on followers but it still isn’t ideal. I’m sure Ashton Kutcher gets more favorites than Barack Obama, but Barack Obama is clearly more influential than Ashton Kutcher is. I would say that the number of favorites you have correlates directly with the number of followers you have.
I twitter mostly on my iPod Touch. Since visiting linked sites slows me down, I favorites those tweets I want to look at later when I am on my computer. After I am done, I un-favorite them. I wonder what this does with the stats?
The results are disappointing. Only one of my Tweets has ever been added to someone else’s Favorites? Sad.
It’s so tough to go and find older Tweets so I do use the Favorites feature quite often to sorta earmark stuff I want to reference again.