The Top Wine Tweeters – hello @SommelierSara!

It is much easier to identify the top wine twitter users!

I’ll discuss why below but first here’s the graph. It’s based off rating software called Klout, which I’ll discuss more at the bottom of this post. Its over-confident byline is…

The Standard for Internet Influence

click to enlarge

Hellooo SommelierSara!

I was following, or heard of, the other guys but SommelierSara was a surprise.

Nice job Sara! If I was 20 years old I would say you rock, instead I offer air kisses and warm congratulations.

Less of a surprise was garyvee, nectarwine, lenndevours, nytimesdining (think The Pour), and thirstforwine. All of whom scored in the 50s, with Gary at 60 and leading the pack. A solid handshake to you all.

The Interesting Thing about Wine Tweeters

… is that they aren’t necessarily heavily into blogging. Many of them are, but certainly not all of them.

SommeleirSara is more a tweeter than a blogger though she does have a blog. Nothing wrong with that, it just makes her a social media queen in tweeting not blogging.

Let look at her klout score more closely.

This is why I like Klout so much

Rather than offer a simple top 10 list they are more subtle about how a social media person is important – not just that they are.

Sara is a great communicator. She has been put on 100 lists, 25+ people often retweet what she has to say, she has 100+ unique mentioners, and  has 50+ unique retweets.

A bit more about Gary V

As though you haven’t heard enough about him already

@garyvee has 850,000+ followers, about 6 months ago he had klout scores in the 90s, though with far fewer followers.

The massive increase in his follower base means that the % of his follower mentions and retweets has significantly dropped.

I’m speculating that Klout believes many of these followers are not actively following Gary. Specifically the measures follower mention and follower retweet has dropped, reducing his overall score.

Which kinda makes sense, but seems a bit harsh – the more followers you have, the more your score may drop (as its % based, not absolute)? Not too convinced with that.

That Methodology Thingy

I’ve just paused my review of the top wine bloggers while I find some better social media measurement tools.

The problem with looking at bloggers is that the statistics I want require some expensive social media measurement tools. So while I wrangle my way into to getting an affordable version of these tools I’ve moved onto other social media. In this post –  twitter.

Here’s how I did it:

1. I compiled a list of twitter users from my wine blog reviews.
2. I used the Klout Labs tool Klout Birdbrain (I’ll do a separate post about that) to find the rest through Facebook Interests > Wine
3. I only looked at twitter users who had a Klout score of 30+ (and then added some of the wine bloggers who didn’t for context).
4. I went to klout.com and entered their twitter handle, noted the resulting score, and graphed it.

Issues:

• I was relying on Birdbrain to fill out my tweeter list. Given it is a Lab tool that may have been a bit hopeful.
• The scores seem to change quickly. These were entered into Klout on 5 September 2010.

Klout is it

I’m not prepared to just accept someone’s ranking without good justification and methodology. I couldn’t find that in the blog world (though I’m sure it will come, like it has for search and advertising) but it’s been straight forward to find it in the twitter world – its Klout.

(I also looked at wefollow but Klout seems more transparent and methodical. And, well, accurate).

If you’ve been following my blog posts over the last month you’ll see I’m trying to tie business and social media objectives, to media types, and then measure the performance of a social media campaign.

And Klout has done this for me, almost

Here’s a video from Klout on how to use their system:

So if I’m trying to increase the awareness of my store I would look to partner with those tweeters who have a large interested audience.

Klout calls this True Reach and they measure it through:

• Followers
• Friends
• Total Retweets
• Follower/Follow Ratio
• Followed Back %
• @ Mention Count
• List Count
• List Followers Count

If I want to boost my engagement with a community of tweeters then I would look for:

• Unique Retweeters
• Unique Messages Retweeted
• Follower Retweet %
• Unique @ Senders
• Follower Mention %
• Inbound Messages Per Outbound Message
• Update Count

What Klout calls Amplification Probability.

If I want to be the seen as an authoritative source of fine wines then I’d look to build up a relationship with the most influential:

• List inclusions
• Follower/Follow Ratio
• Followed Back %
• Unique Senders
• Unique Retweeters
• Influence of Followers
• Influence of Retweeters and Mentioners

Klout calls this Network Influence.

Social Media Measurement software companies please note

Putting aside the fact that I’ve never seen more jargon on any webpage , Klout has done a good job of explaining how they come up with a score and why some tweeters rank better than others.

I appreciate they can’t reveal all their “secret sauce” but they have provided enough for me to be happy that it’s a robust measure. (To be fair I also know that twitter is completely transparent with their usage data so this makes it easier to measure than the less open blog world.)

They also pass the “sniff test” as the results above show.

What I particularly like

Is the way they don’t just give a stark rating but rather put a rating into context and show why it’s good or bad, and how it could be improved.

Give it a go and please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.