I’ve just posted a Top 100 list of investment real estate related Twitter users.  As I mention in that post, I was really just trying to get a good list of Twitter users to follow and wanted to make sure that they are all relevant for what I do.  As I was compiling the list of users, I decided to run some analytics on their user data and eventually came up with a way to rank the users.  For a long list of Twitter users and the raw data that went into the ranking, see this 11 page PDF.

The Top 100 is generally a weighted ranking of user data across four general metrics.  Before I go into the metrics at all, I will give my general theory behind why things should be weighted as they are in the rankings.  Twitter is made up of a few different kinds of users.  For instance there are power users, casual users, social users and spammers.  In trying to flesh out who the most influential users are, I set up a rating that rewards being active in tweeting, having a lot of followers, and having more followers than you are following.  You could call this sort of a high school yearbook test.  If you’re on the yearbook staff, and you sign a lot of yearbooks, but nobody wants to sign your yearbook, you probably aren’t going to be the homecoming king/queen.  For my rankings, I wanted the power users that other people in my industry are paying attention to.

I’m sure my methodology is biased and could be improved, but I still think it serves the original purpose of sourcing a number of Twitter users that are related to what I do, and are active in Twitter.  If you’re also trying to grow your Twitter base, check out the PDF or the ranking post and follow the people who look relevant to your part of the real estate world.

Here are the metrics used in the rankings:

Relevance: This is data derived from taking the very long list of real estate related Twitter users and compiling who they are following (not who is following them).  The more real estate related people following you, the higher the relevance ranking.

Followers: Pretty simple metric.  How many total followers do you have?

# Following: Again, simple.

Tweets: The total number of tweets related to your profile.

Followers Minus Following: A simple mathematic calculation that takes your followers and subtracts the number of people you are following.  The basic premise of using this stat is to decrease the influence of spammers, or people who follow five users for every one that is following them.

Combined Ranking: Each user is given a rank on the other four metrics and then that ranking is averaged out, and slightly weighted towards relevance to real estate.

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