Discounting Follower Inflation with the ClickMarket's TruPop™ Score

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On a near daily basis, I'm getting followers who are following tens of thousands of twitterers.This begs the question, what value is a follower to me if my tweets are buried in a combination of 30,000 other streams?

I have a rule of thumb that says one cannot attentively follow more than 300 people and I'm actually thinking that Dunbar's Number may even be a better threshold (i.e. See "The Rule of 150" in Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point).While Twitter is an "opt-in to follow" model of communication, we believe that social media is most effective when there is "engagement."The very use of the word "social" implies a two-way relationship and before one can engage, there must be listening.The non-discriminate follower is not listening and is effectively breaking the "social contract" of social media participation.

People who are following thousands or tens of thousands of people are obviously not interested in paying attention.How could they be?Their intention seems transparent in that they are only following people in anticipation of being automatically followed in return.This results in what we have dubbed "follower inflation" and, just as grade inflation decreases the value of that illusive "A," follower inflation diminishes the value of the "Follower" metric.

While it may sound cliché, our focus at ClickMarkets is on quality over quantity.There is no value in cultivating a follower/following relationship that is driven by the value of a number that is quickly losing its value.We are seeking relationships where people are connecting around a common interest and truly sharing information.We call these "natural followers". With natural followers it's the exchange of information that is primary, not the value of the follower count – they have a natural interest in what the people they follow have to share.

To mitigate the effect of follower inflation, we are working on a new population metric based on the concept that a follower has limited attention capacity or potential.The formula is still in development but the principle is quite simple.First, we compute what we call a the TwiDAP™ metric for "Twitterer's Dunbar Attention Potential™":

TwiDAP = Dunbar Number ÷ Follower Count

So, a twitterer following 50 people has a TwiDAP of 3.One following 20,000, has a TwiDAP of 0.0075.Thus the higher the TwiDAP, the more potential for a follower to see something posted to his or her stream.Anyone with a TwiDAP ≥ 1 is considered to be a "natural follower" with strong listening potential while anyone in the range 1 > TwiDAP ≤ 0.5 is considered to be a "casual follower" with moderate listening potential and anyone with a TwiDAP < 0.5 dips into the territory of being an "artificial follower" with little listening potential.

We then use a modified version of each follower's TwiDAP to compute what we call the ClickMarkets TruPop™ Score for a client.Natural followers have a greater influence on this score than casual or artificial followers and, thus, we can see when our efforts are attracting people more likely to engage with a client's brand.Additionally, we can then use the TruPop™ score to scale the value of any engagement because we can effectively marginalize the penalty of any artificial followers who are not listening anyway.

As long as people are keeping score, there will be those who will try to game the system to inflate their stature.We'll will continue to refine how we measure the size of our audience and the reach of our message but for now we think this helps us avoid being distracted by a worthless metric already compromised by follower inflation.