There are dozens–hundreds?–of Twitter statistical applications, but they all fail.
The presumption with every statistical program is the username being tracked is a new name, but in my reincarnated Twitter example, I have a new name that is the same as an older name–and the applications assume I never changed.
For instance, Tweet Stats shows me this graph:
…but if it was accurate, it would have started September 30, not the dawn of mankind.
Ditto for these Twitter Counter numbers:
And this FollowCost data:
Other statistical applications show similar data. I didn’t click through all of them to compare and contrast, but at least my daily Twitter graph is where it should be, indicating how little I am tweeting these days:
Not only is Twitter rank meaningless, so too are the stats behind the ranks.
Related posts:
- Show Me the Money or Twitter Will Fail
- Twitter Grading Over 30 Days
- Analyzing 365 Days of Blog Visitors Yields Facebook Censorship On Top
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
An interesting read! Keep up the awesome posts!
By the way, KeywordLuv is amazing. I use it on all of my blogs and it really does increase the amount of REAL comments from readers, as there is an incentive for them to post.
-Jessica
All these twitter stat website do seem to be fairly crude….I still think there’s a gap in the market for someone to produce some software or a web app that will accurately be able to tell you how your ACCOUNTS (i.e more than 1!) are benefitting you.
Why is this proof that Twitter statistical apps fail? Because you are 1 of maybe 4 people that have decided to rename their original account to become an archive of tweets, and then sign up for a new account under the same original name?
It’s a pretty rare occasion that someone decides to resign their account so that someone else may take the name, which is essentially what you’re doing; only, you’re that someone else taking the name. To me, anyway, it seems a little much to ask these statistical apps to check for this scenario every time they pull stats for an account. Of course, it would still be useful
And if it doesn’t eat up too many computing cycles/bandwidth (which I have no way of knowing) AND if there’s actually something in the Twitter API that allows developers to do this, then I’m all for it. Until then, I think it’s a pretty high order, but I’m glad you at least brought it up for discussion. Thanks Ari!
New from Tyler Hayes: Why I have “The” in front of my name
This is interesting. I’m currently involved in reclaiming twitter accounts for various commercial organisations so this would be very relevant to them. Although the previous commenter has said that it is pretty rare for someone to relinquish their twitter ID for someone else to take it over I would disagree. This is exactly what I have been carrying out on behalf of various organisations.
Thanks for the post – I shall be using it as a reference for my clients.
I’ve done the same thing for some of my clients as well, though it’s not my full-time job. That said, even if I do 20 accounts for 30 clients, that’s only 600 Twitter accounts out of the millions of unique active users on it, which I would still define as rare. Do you see this happening significantly more often?
New from Tyler Hayes: Keep meeting new people
I don’t know. Should an action, despite its rarity, be overlooked? I don’t think so.
Glad to help, action man.
Awesome post Ari!