The urge to see how we stack up against others is irresistible, isn’t it?  Twitter Grader tells me my ‘Grade’ is 96.7, but what does that mean?  Twitter Grader used to provide some hints about their algorithm but no longer.  

My observation is that it’s based mostly upon the number of followers you have and the number of your followers’ followers. With new people following me every day who each have 46,934 followers themselves, no wonder my grade is so high.

While Twitter Grader may be a quick, easy, and fun tool, I propose that for the small business owner it is a poor tool for measuring how well you are doing on Twitter.  As a small business owner, in addition to the ‘what you you doing right now?’ stuff you should be using Twitter to:

• Engage in conversation with your tribe
• Provide helpful information, including links to relevant online material
• Building your brand by reaching out to strangers and helping them

If you engage in these activities a little bit every day, you will build an actual following, not just a list of followers. You want followers who actually pay attention to what you have to say. It’s unlikely that TheBusyBrain (38,233 followers) even knows who I am, let alone pays attention to my tweets.

So is there a tool that measures us against this standard? The folks at Web Analytics Demystified have this tool called Twitter Influence Calculator that I like a lot. (One of the reasons is that they disclose their algorithm here.)

Granted, Twitter Influence Calculator’s results require a little more effort to digest than Twitter Grader’s single number.  But telling me things like:

“Relative visibility based on roughly 13 references to @dbarnhart: SLOWLY EMERGING”

Is far more useful. And though this one is a bit humbling, it is far more telling than Twitter Grader’s 96.7:

“Relative generosity based on @dbarnhart retweeting roughly 2 times on behalf of others: SLOWLY EMERGING”

Another big difference between the two tools is that Twitter Influence Calculator is heavily time-weighted.  It looks at your activity over the past week.  Twitter Grader on the other hand, doesn’t seem to care how engaged I’ve been recently as long as I have popular followers.

To sum it up:

• Twitter Influence Calculator measures how engaged and conversational you are.
• Twitter Grader measures the potential size of your Twitter ‘footprint’

Of course, in some cases Twitter Grader will be a better measure. It’s up to you to look at what you are trying to accomplish and then pick the better tool.