Although as I’ve said before I’m very sceptical of lists which rate users of Twitter by the number of followers they have, there is some merit in some of the more complex Twitter rating schemes. A good example of these is TweetLevel which, as you can see from the details on its site, includes factors such as how well people are using Twitter and how much other people on Twitter respond to them.
So for a bit of mildly instructive fun, I’ve plugged all the Liberal Democrat MPs on Twitter into the tool to see how they rate. The two most important caveat to these figures are that (a) it’s only Twitter – some MPs will have made sensible, rational decisions to prioritise other methods of communication, such as local email lists, and (b) it doesn’t measure the extent to which MPs are getting at local audiences, national opinion formers or Lib Dem activists – these are three very different audiences and different MPs will be targeting different mixes with varying success.
But with that said, here are the numbers with the MPs’ Twitter names:
1. nick_clegg 59
2. joswinson 52
3. lfeatherstone 46
4. vincecable 44
5. philwillismp 42
6. SandraGidley 40
7. acarmichaelmp 37
8. normanlamb 36
9. willie_rennie 33
10. GregMulholland1 32
11. SusanKramer 30
12. timfarron 28
13.= AndrewGeorgeMP 27
13.= AnnetteBrookeMP 27
13.= eddaveymp 27
16. jgoldsworthy 26
16.= mooremichaelk 26
18. ChrisHuhne 25
19. lembitopik 25
20. PaulBurstow 23
21. stevewebb1 22
22. thomasbrake 20
23. PaulRowen 19
24. malcolmbruce 18
25. dannyalexander 17
26. JLeechMP 15
27. DonFosterMP 14
And finally, ahem, I would come in second in this table (hey, my initials are MP so why shouldn’t I be in the table?) with libdemvoice snapping at my heels and just ahead of joswinson.
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I’ve noticed these scores vary a lot – compare your figures with Mark Reckons last week.
Indeed, I’ve noticed that Lembit has managed to climb from 24 to 25 despite not actually using his account at all over the past week. That does seem quite random.
Seems a bit arbitrary – and like all these things, it assumes “there is no world outside twitter”.
I watch a number of people on twitter, including some on this list. I do this using my RSS reader because the whole point of using an RSS reader is that you only have one thing to look at; I’m not going to use twitter’s own “follower” system. I doubt I’m the only person who does this, and all these metrics are blind to such things.
As a rule, I distrust any metric which manages to exclude me from consideration.
I’m not sure you can criticise a system for ranking twitter accounts on the basis that it doesn’t take the world outside of twitter into consideration. No-one is saying it is the be-all and end-all – indeed Mark has a caveat to that effect.
I’m a bit sceptical too – if I were an MP I would come in at 10th equal.
But if it’s valid it shows the potential influence of a mere parish councillor!
James: interesting point about the volatility of the scores, which I’ve not looked at before. Perhaps the answer is for me to regularly update this table…
For a more comprehensive list of the TweetLevels of LibDems on Twitter, visit http://is.gd/7sUN4 .
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[...] 3 March 2010 0 comments Tags: Online politics, twitter Changes in position and score are since February’s figures, and the same caveats apply as before to these numbers from TweetLevel (i.e. Twitter isn’t [...]