Social Media Metrication

There is a fascinating little toy called Twerpscan that shows everyone following you on Twitter, and their Following/Followers ratio, on one (scrapable) page. I had a look at mine, and the following Social Graph (its a real graph, too) emerged from the deep BoE*Analysis



You will note that the scales on both axes are log-log (ie for every doubling in distance on the screen, the scales go up 10x). You will also notice that, given that we are changing all the words in Social Network (Sorry, Social Graph) analysis, I have made two early attempts at immortality by defining:

(i) The Dunbarrier - the Dunbar number point, where you follow and are followed by 150 people (Calling them "friends" is probably pushing it here...). After this point, you are no longer a purely social animal, you are a networker of one stripe or another.

(ii) The Followtio - the Follower/Following ratio. This is interesting, as it only occurs on networks such as Twitter where you don't have reciprocal social network connections. I have also made the (totally unfounded on any facts, but this is early days after all) assumption that between the ratios of 1:2 and 2:1, a person's social networking intentions are roughly social, rather than any attempts to "game" the network in any way.

Anyway, it does give the rather fascinating coffee-table analysis, in 2x2 form:

(i) "Social" Networkers - by far the majority of people in my network - are connected to and by friends and people who seem to want to know them for what they have to say.

(ii) "Voyeurs and Scambots" - those following X,000 people with a much smaller "followed by" ratio. As far as I can see these are sites that are looking to scrape data from people, whether for market research (BarrackObama56) or voyeuristic intentions (Some others) is unclear. Anyway, I can't believe these are there for my welfare, so blocking is your friend.

(iii) "New Media Broadcasters" - I found I had very few of these in the people following me (by definition), but far more of them in the people I followed. When I looked at them, they mostly tended to follow the same people (and guess who they followed in the main - see the next group below) but were followed by many. Typically these people are Journalists, authors or related professions. Now I can appreciate that some people in this camp may not want all those followers, but if the answer to the question "why are you then on social media" is roughly "to flog my wares" then my view is it behooves them to play nice. For myself, now that I understand the game I have now culled those that add nothing but are just rebroadcasting Their Masters Voices, and kept those who, by dint of having a following due to having an original voice, are saying something different.

(iii) Social "Networkers" - aka Scoble et al - many Blogging A Listers of the original social kind fall into this group. In a way I prefer this lot to the Broadcasters above, as I think they "get" the New Media more in that they are far more into listening as well as broadcasting.

In fact with respect to this last point I noticed something else....if I looked at who was chatting reciprocally (ie their reply ratio was fairly balanced to incoming comments), typically they fell within the "Followtio" boundaries or under the Dunbarrier - ie if you ask @Scoble something, he will often reply, and for this I totally respect the guy, he must be totally indefatigueable. Try that with a Scambot or a New Media Broadcaster however, and you far less likely to get a reply. (Now I can't prove this, I don't have the time to write the scraper to do it, and maybe those outliers are all Direct Messaging like mad - but it was my empirical observation.)

What I am curious to see going forward is how the live darwinian universe that is a real time social network deals with the outliers, because both the Scambots and Hi-Followtio Broadcasters are "free riding" on the collective conversation medium, and my hypothesis is that they will be filtered out over time (with the exception of those adding original thought).

With the high volume people outside the Dunbarrier, I just want to know how they keep it up! (ie is it sustainable without changing to a more corporate model, and does this then change the dynamic?)

*Back of Envelope - or in this case, a piece of photocopier paper