Mike Blackburn

Like Me? Follow Me.

I'm not the most prolific twitterer in the world, I often wonder like many people whether I'm a good twitterer and if my thoughts have any value to anyone.

We were talking about this in the office the other day and being someone who's fond of playing with numbers I came up with a very smple metric I like to call the FARTT (Followers As Related To Tweets) index.

Simply speaking the index counts how many followers you've obtained per tweet you've made, there is only one criteria and that's that the tweeter must have made at least 100 tweets. Not having a lower limit means that the results can be somewhat skewed.


FARTT = No. of Followers/No. of Tweets made

I know that there could be lots of interpretations of this index but as a bit of fun it's quite interesting. Using it I've already identified two distinct groups of people - celebrity tweeters stand out from regular people using the index as they tend to have higher FARTT scores. @stephenfry is the biggest FARTT I've found so far with a score of 266 when I last looked.

Regular twitterers scores seem to generally sit in a range between 0 and 2.

I'm pleased to say that amongst I-COM's twitterers I'm the biggest FARTT, various scores are detailed in the table below. 

  1. @tykemike: 1.75
  2. @timothyjroberts: 0.53
  3. @thenarrowescape: 0.42
  4. @jamesroome: 0.41
  5. @pgreenhalgh: 0.40
  6. @annagruber1: 0.37
  7. @keirgibson: 0.12
  8. @justhipper: 0.10

I'd be really interested to find the biggest FARTT amongst our readers, if you have a score higher than ours let us know. We'll send a prize of a whoopee cushion to the person with the highest score that contacts us by the end of August.

Tags: I COM, Online PR, Social Media, Twitter

Discussion

Posted by Alex Moss on Jul 20th, 2010
0.603 - get in!
Posted by John McClane on Jul 20th, 2010
@DieHardSEO = 0.82
Posted by Rhys on Jul 20th, 2010
0.08 :(
Posted by tykemike on Jul 20th, 2010
Well Yippee-ki-yay John! - but sorry Alex still leads the non-icom race - you've not reached the 100 tweets threshold :(
Posted by JamesD on Jul 23rd, 2010
I\'ve been thinking about this and a thought just occured based on your formula:

FARTT = No. of Followers/No. of Tweets made

Are you counting ALL followers - ie including those I\'m not following in return, like spammers?

Surely you yourselves have had people following you that don\'t represent your target audience.

If so, then those results are skewed themselves since the FARTT index doesn\'t represent the true value of followers to tweets.

I think the formula should be changed to:

FARTT = (No. of Followers - No. of Followers not Followed)/No. of Tweets made
Posted by tykemike on Jul 26th, 2010
Hi James,

Thanks very much for the comment, you raise a valid point and I think you've exposed the over simplicity of the index.

The real challenge in measuring the effectiveness of twitter is a much bigger issue, for example what about re-tweets? If your tweets are being distributed to a wider audience shouldn't the tweeter get extra index credit in someway. there are also numerous other factors that should be considered.

The main issue with what you suggest though is that if we follow your metric I might no longer be the biggest FARTT in I-COM. A title which I hold dear.

Thanks again for your comment - by the way what's your FARTT score?
Posted by JamesD on Jul 29th, 2010
If we use the same formula for the rewteets and change the formula to:

((No. of Followers - No. of Followers not Followed)/No. of Tweets made) / (No. of Followers / No. of retweets) = -(No. of Followers - No. of Followers not Followed)/No. of Tweets made

aka

((F - nF)/T) / (F/RT) = -(F - nF)/T

does that make any sense? I'm still a little unsure about that.

Nah, you'll have dropped a few points but I'm sure everyone else would have done too. Spammers get everywhere and no-one always follows everyone.

My FARTT score?

0.23
Posted by Fat Roland on Jul 31st, 2010
I got 0.14. I'm happy with my number of followers, but I tweet a lot of crap.
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