I must thank Heather for bringing up this brilliant question. To me, Twitter Favorites is another hidden gem for content discovery. Apart from discovering smart tips, Twitter Favorites works as a bookmarking tool to collect testimonials, acknowledgments about others and our work. Either way, it deserves more attention from us rather than rusting itself away on the sidebar.

Original Artwork by @Natasha

The state and future of Twitter is passionately debated as users and industry pundits explore whether or not the platform and the relationships that connect one another are in danger of slowing or worse, regressing.  Over the last year, Twitter experienced its most phenomenal growth to date, fueled by the adoption of the communication network by highly visible and influential personalities that attracted legions of new users to establish one-to-many and ultimately many-to-many connections. But, then the meteoric ascent practically leveled-off…

Original Post: Twitter Influence Graders: Behind the Green Curtain

Does influence on Twitter matter? And, if it does, what is the best way to measure it?

On the first question it seems reasonable to say influence only matters if all or part of the reason you are on Twitter is for business … then “influence” matters.

So if it matters to you, how do you measure influence?

In Twitter 1.0 most believed: Followers = Influence. Clearly the world of Twitter has moved on.

Today there are many tools that claim to measure an individual’s influence using up to 140 characters.

A well known rule of thumb in business is the so-called Pareto principle (or the 80/20 rule) that 20% of participants will account for 80% of the activity.   Metrics firm Nielsen decided to test out if the same applies to Twitter - do 20% of tweeple account for 80% of what takes place on Twitter.

The answer is no.   At least in the UK, an even smaller number - 7% - account for 79% of Twitter activity.

Nielsen found that ‘light’ users (less than 2 minutes per month, actually broken across 30 days that is pretty much zero) account for 67% of the audience, medium users (22 mins per month, so still less than a minute a day) account for 26%, while heavy users (1hr+ a month) account for 7% of UK tweeple.

Without a doubt, one of the most popular shiny new objects of many social media marketing programs is Twitter. There are Twitter books, Twitter conferences, Twitter blogs and numerous articles devoted to Twitter marketing.  Unfortunately, there’s not enough time left over after reading all the promises of marketing nirvana from using Twitter to actually implement recommendations.

Despite the fact that Twitter has more than 32 million users, has received massive publicity from both celebrities and government, and produced remarkable results for companies like Dell and Zappos, many business executives still don’t “get” Twitter.