Next Thursday, I’m giving a talk on my research to people from the communications department. Outline below.
When we talk about how we quantify success in social media (and Twitter), we need to consider how we’re defining engagement. Does someone following us mean that they are engaged with our content? Maybe – but maybe not. We only have to look at spammers with > 1000 followers to see that our current metric for success (number of followers) is severely lacking. I think @ mentions are a far better measure of engagement – it shows people are responding to, and/or retweeting your content.
How can we express this? We can view each @ mention as an edge on a graph, which we can visualize. Whilst our network of followers/following can be massive, typically for a social network (this has been demonstrated on both Facebook and Twitter) the number of people we interact with is just a small fraction of our network. What information can we gain by pulling out this network, and the cliques within it? Potentially it can tell us a lot about engagement, and make some smart suggestions for growing our network, too.
On Twitter? Have you requested a graph yet? Get yours here.