How to do Profile Analysis in Twitter?

When we started buzzom, the first thing that we approached was the Profile Analytics. It was the key function which allowed us to analyze any Twitter profile and calculate their relevance to the users.

The importance of profile analysis is gaining a lot of attention due to the leverage Twitter gives to every individual. Everyone in Twitter has their own brand value and everyone in Twitter has their own influence range.

But in this saturated market of analytics, what does it take to make the perfect score and to measure the brand value of a single profile with accuracy. We have been thinking about it a lot and have invested ample amount of time going through the data and observing the emerging trends in Twitter.

Does measuring profile be of any value to business?

Source : informing-arts

Really. How can a profile score help you may good decision. In fact how can we be so sure that a score can reveal everything about the profile?

But the key point is not the score but the requirement of businesses or marketers which gives such scores some value. In a business, you are continuously monitoring your social media channels and its impact on your traffic or sales.

Social media monitoring is very similar to your web analytics. In web analytics you are looking at traffic details and their referrals. In social media, you are looking at the growth of your followers and watching the impact of you tweets through ReTweet count and so on.

Based on these analysis, you make your social media strategies and control your activities in Twitter or other social media platform. Hence, understanding the profile of your network and your selves, you can understand a lot on how you could run your social media campaigns.

What are the best attributes to monitor while judging Profile?

First of all, there are basically two kinds of profile analysis - quantitative and qualitative. In quantitative, you look at followers count, followings count, Tweet count, ReTweet Count and so on. In qualitative analysis you look at the contents being shared, their sources, their category and so on.

Source : umich.edu

But let me give you few key indicators that you immediately notice when you open some one’s profile.

1. Name
2. Bio
3. Followers and Followings
4. Tweet Volume and Activity

What does this say about the profile? Though the list is quite small, it reveals a lot about the profile. In addition to these key numerical details, you cannot ignore the quality of contents being shared by the profile.

Spam and fraud profiles can be detected easily within few seconds of observation. But in order to find the real influence of the profile, you need to go one level deep into the tweets and their tweet stream.

If you find a profile with high mentions then they probably have high influence. But that is not enough, the characteristics of people who mention is also very important because they give weight to the profile. For example, getting mentioned by automated profile is not a very value addition to your profile. But getting mentioned by real people is a lot more valuable.

I will list down some of the major scores which will help you define profiles in Twitter with a lot of quality. These are some of the plans for new Buzzom Score which is under research.

Network Analysis

Reach : Number of Followers, Number of List and their followers.
Mutuality : Number of following and followers. (Ratio of Following and Followers)
Reach is a fundamental quantity that determines the growth of the campaign. The more people the cause or the product gets received by, higher the visibility of the service. But these reach has to be classified as real people and not automated profiles. Though automated profiles (bot) has their own advantages, having more human in your network makes all the difference.

Source: atomthought

Social Actions Analysis

Affinity : Number of people the profile has mentioned and the number of unique people who have mentioned profile. (excluding RTs)
Generosity : Number of RTs done by the profile.
Recency : Number of Tweets in last 7 weeks.

After the reach, it is important to understanding the engagement between the profile and the people in his/her network. High level of engagement means closer community and strong bonding. Activity also means the dedication towards the profile given by the user. An active profile has more potential and credential over inactive profiles.

Brand Analysis

Reactions : Number of RTs and mentions received by the Profile.
Promoter : Number of unique people RT-ing or Mentioning your Profile.

Ultimately, after the reach and social activities you need to look at the popularity of the profile. There are some very high brand names in Twitter which are talked by people every minutes. You can call this the high brands in Twitter.
I hope the post below throws some light on the Twitter Profile analytics. There are many stones left to be un turn but this can be a great start for any business seeking to make sense.

Please provide your feedback and comments.

Get custom size for your BlogAds plugin

After almost weeks of the launch of BlogAds, we are happy to say that we have had good responses from bloggers. In order to encourage more participation, we are adding custom features to BlogAds platform for greater usability.

On this list of features, Buzzom BlogAds have recently launched new feature to customize the size of  Blog Ad. Before, you would get a code of a fixed size Ad which you had to add to your Blogs. But now, BlogAds provides you an option to chose your own size.

1. Click on the View Plugins

In Select Plugin Section, you can choose from different slot which gives you plugins of different width size. You can easily choose from 1o different sizes which will fit your blog’s layout.

Do feel free to send your thoughts and advice.

Buzz Button adds Google Buzz to its list

Buzz Button is a Firefox and Chrome plug-ins for users to directly submit websites to any social networking sites. So far we had 8 different social networking sites listed on the button, besides Google Buzz.

But now, we have launched the buzz button for Google Buzz. Now you can seamlessly submit the sites that you can visiting to any social networking sites. So far, Buzzom Button is the best firefox plugins for sharing news on social networking sites.

Buzz Button

Please download the plug-ins :

Firefox : Download

Chrome : Download

Do not forget to add your reviews for the tool.

Let us know what you think of the button.

Buzzom Team is looking for Investment

We have come a long way, from an internal tool to market our products in Twitter to a widely used Twitter application by the marketers.

We started Buzzom as a tool to help users follow and unfollow easily in Twitter. Many folks criticized us for building a spamming tool but we found many folks who enjoyed it too. This kept us moving.

From the day one, Buzzom was not a spamming tool. We hate spam as much as anyone does. There is spam by email bombarding, but mass emailing facility has its own advantage. Buzzom’s facility to provide follow-unfollow had its advantage too.

That was just a start for us. We kept innovating and working hard, and now we have crossed 1 million page views a month mark. This was a challenging journey but the team worked hard to make it look easy.

Buzzom is now a People Search engine, and a complete Twitter Application. Many analysts believe that our People Search, Twitin Account Management, and Feed Management are best globally in their individual space. We are proud to hear it.

PC World, Smart Company, Forbes, Shoutmeloud etc covered us recently, and we are more enthusiastic than ever to make the application better.

We do admit that we could have made Buzzom Profile, Statistics and Buzzom Desktop much better. We are working on them, and we promise to come back srong in these areas as well.

We have specialist MIS Reporting and Analytics Team, and soon you will see good Statistics and Analtics in Buzzom. This might not be limited to Twitter but include other social Media networks as well.

Buzzom has entered Facebook through Feed Management facility. We are working to integrate some features for other Social Networks like LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Orkut, MySpace, Digg, stumbleUpon, Youtube, SlideShare and many more.

Further, we have recently launched the premium version of Buzzom on January 5th which has been able to gain 100+ user with in few weeks with good response from the users.

We will keep innovating and working hard. And we are looking for strategic investors. We need the funds to fasten the growth. But we are choosy and will go only with investor who believes in Social Media and Web 2.0.

If you are interested to explore this investment opportunity, visit our investor relation page or mail us directly. You might be the one we are looking for.

Enjoy the Social Media experience with Buzzom. Cheers!

If you want more information about the growth of Buzzom :

• Buzzom Crosses 1 Million Page Views a Month
• How Company can use Buzzom to hire people
• How to track Brands in Twitter?
• Buzzom ranks among Top 10K sites in the world [Alexa Rank] With a Complete History.
• Moving around New Buzzom Interface

Channels of Buzzom and InRev

Calculating your feed timing in Twitter

Feed Management is one of the most used feature in the Buzzom, but I have been receiving many mails on how best to use the feed tool and the different terms of the feature like cycle, repeat etc. Let me take you through the working of buzzom feed management and the best way to use them.

Lets us go one by one:

FeedUrl : It is the location where you add the url of your feed.

After you add your feed url, you are given an option to choose your channel. You can choose both if you like. In the Channel box there are three key parameters to be set.

Number :This is the number of feed post you want to update per one cycle. But what is cycle? Cycle is the time period within which you want to check your feed updates. Read below.

Cycle of :Cycle is the time period which will control the flow of your feed to the channel. If you set it to 24 hrs, then you will be updating your channel once in every 24 hrs. In this case the repeat of your feed will be zero. But if you choose 12 hrs, then your feed will be checked every 12 hrs, which means twice in 24hrs, so your repeat will be 2.

In each cycle, the number of feed is posted as given by the user. If I set numbers to 6, it means that in one cycle 6 new feeds will be updated to the channel.

Here is the calculations:

Cycle : 2 hrs : Post = 24/2 = 12 hence repeat = 11

Cycle : 3 hrs : Post = 24/3 = 8 hence repeat = 7

Cycle : 4 hrs : Post = 24/4 = 6 hence repeat = 5

Cycle : 6 hrs : Post = 24/6 = 4 hence repeat = 3

Cycle : 8 hrs : Post = 24/8 = 3 hence repeat = 2

Cycle : 12 hrs : Post = 24/12 = 2 hence repeat = 1

Is it possible to follow all your followers and use Twitter effectively?

Well this is the most difficult question I have at present. I have always followed all my followers, and also went on finding and following interesting people around. I had good success in getting huge number of followers, and the journey has been great so far.

I got decent success in marketing my blog and company products. Buzzom is one of them. Buzzom now stands being one of the most successful Twitter Application Service, is close to getting 200k pageviews a month. With Account Statistics, SPAM Control and Public Profile, we should be getting close to half a million pageviews per month soon.

All this is fine, but slowly a poison is getting inside my Twitter Account — SPAM. On a simple thumb rule testing, I found half of my friends are Spammers. These Spammers are of following types:

1. Grow and Sale Accounts

There are people who create huge number of accounts and start running automated script to follow new people. They target reciprocators like @GuyKawasaki, @leplan (I), @unmarketing, @cheth, @dollars5 etc. and follow them all. They unfollow people who donot follow them back. When they reach a decent size of around 5 thousand to 10 thousand followers, the account is sold for some price.

I have least problem with these people. What they do is not of value to me; but it does not harm too.

2. Twitter Stream Marketers

I have been getting many ads targeted to me in person. This is not bad and many of them is of some value too. But these ads sometime force me to follow only what they write, and they don’t stop after I start using their service. This is painful.

I get a lot of  replies ‘@leplan’ from one or a group of accounts with same information. This simply floods my Twitter stream and I have no way to weed out these replies and only follow the genuine ones.

Note : We are very sorry to have used this strategy once. We stopped it immediately after getting complains.

3. Information Dessimators

There are some accounts, which continuous monitor other account performance, and provide the information on them. Below is one such example.

Followermonitor does a good job of monitoring unfollows and reporting; but take a case you unfollow 50 people and you get 50 such messages. This is painful again.

I like @TwitLandMark and @MrMileStone, and I have no complain with them. I don’t see my followers count daily, and it is good to know any landmark I attain.

4. Forceful World of Mouth Marketing

There are few companies, who have their policy of Tweeting from user account while the user uses the service. I feel good services deserve some form of credit, and the user can atleast tweet about the product. But the problem is to get hundreds of tweets, and at regular intervals from the service users without their knowledge.

Few companies have put in policies and terms of service; but this is not enough. If I am using a Twitter API based third party tool, I not necessarily like to Tweet about it. If I like it, I will certainly make a pro-service Tweet. What pisses me off is automated tweeting from my account.

One of my friends used one such service yesterday and it was Tweeting a pro-service Tweet automatically from his account every four hours. He didn’t know about it before I told him. He then had no other options but to change his password.

When you use any third party tool, make sure you understand it.

5. Genuine and valuable; but just too much

These are people who are genuine, and their tweets are of good value. The problem is the information overflow. I know many good Tweeters who tweet more than 50 per day; and worst part most of these are feeds from his or his friend’s blogs.

I feel so much pain when he continues to do the same even after I complain. What he forgets is -  if 1000 people post 50 Tweets per day, then I have 5,000 Tweets to read from them. This is a problem for many. We get too much information, too less time to consume.

I would rather love to get 5 Tweet from one person per week, and hear from 50,000 people.

6. Chatters, the Social Dudes

These are the people by whom Twitter lives. They constitute the majority of the Twitter users, and they own majority of the Twitter stream. They are very responsive and are damn helpful. I love to talk to such people.

The problem is here: if I have 5000 friends in my list and are talking to each other through replies ‘@’; it floods my Twitter stream. I have no way to filter them out. I am helpless.

This is much like death of a person in the Atmosphere of Nitrogen. We know Nitrogen is not harmful; but sadly people die because of lack of Oxygen.

I would suggest my dear friends to talk more in DM or have personal discussion in Facebook, Orkut or Messenger. Twitter can best be used for broadcasting messages, and consuming messages of public importance.

7. Welcome DMers

Welcome Direct Message is good; but do we need to send it? Once someone follows me, he will be more happy to get quality Tweets from me than a welcome message. I am sure if someone does not like my Tweet, he will unfollow me and won’t be thinking of my sweet welcome message before pressing the ‘unfollow’ button.

There are lots of follow and unfollow work going on in Twitter. Welcome DMs are the worst among all type of spam, and this has made DM almost useless. We will need to do something here.

—-

Now we know some types of spammers. Can we weed them out and remain happy? NO. Strict SPAM control will only make Twitter useless.

I have identified certain rules to live with it:

1. Unfollow immediately, whom you don’t want to listen; you can follow them back anytime again, if needed.

2. Don’t spam and ask your friends not to.

3. Tell the spammers that you feel they are spammers (feedback help sometime)

4. Remain cautious in using third party tools; specially those without 0Auth implementation. Someone saving your password can use it anyway, and may harm you.

5. Follow all your followers who are non-spammers; don’t reciprocate the spammers. Anything that gets rewarded gets repeated. Be aware.

–

I end the article here. What do you feel? Do not forget to share your thoughts. Would love to hear from you and have discussion.

If you like this article, follow me @leplan.

Buzzom becomes the Most Global Indian Site

I was going through various Indian sites and studying their global performance today. Found some very interesting facts and figures. Let me share here.

Here is the Alexa Ranks for Top Indian Sites.

Buzzom has Alexa Rank of 32836.

The above mentioned sites have good traffic and represent big Internet Companies in India; their Indian traffic competes with the traffic of Global Web biggies like Yahoo, MSN and Google.

Below is the graph with percentages of their traffic coming from three big nations — US, China and India.

(Fig: Percenatge of Vistors from US, China and India; Source : Alexa.com)

Above graph shows that Buzzom is the only Indian Site with significant international traffic. Most other sites are centered to India.

(Overall US Traffice — No. of Visits; source compete.com)

According to compete.com, Buzzom is clearly in the big league beating the Job Portal Major Naukri.com and others in US Traffic. It is also closing gap with sites of HDFC Bank, Ibibo and Moneycontrol. Also, it is important to note that Buzzom has one of the highest growth rate in the last three months.

These days the weight of the site is also known from its Google Page Rank too. So, tet us now look at it for these sites.

Railway Ticket booking site irctc.com, ICICI Bank corporate site icicibank.com and Network 18’s Stock Market Information Site moneycontrol.com have the highest Page Rank. They all have 8.

Buzzom is only above travian.in, and has page rank of 3. It has long way to go from here.

Buzzom has the growth rate of about 200% on month-by-month basis since the start. And now, Buzzom has become the most global Indian site, which has achieved the feat in just 5 months. We thank all our users for their support and promise to better service in days ahead.

A sneak peek of the the new (awesome) Buzzom interface!

Let’s face it. We love buzzom, don’t we?

Well, now that being said, we, at Buzzom, want to thank our tens of thousands of users who trusted us all the time and took interest in the Buzzom services. And now I’d like to give a small hint of what have we been cooking inside the Buzzom labs for the last few weeks!

The last few weeks were full of internal meetings and discussions about Buzzom. We read every feedback we recieved (kudos to those senders), analyzed every request in every email, read almost every technology blog on the blogosphere, read thousands of tweets by thousands of users (& retweets of course)! And after all these, we came up with some great ideas to improve Buzzom based on your experiences!

So here is a quick preview of what you can expect to see in Buzzom, in the coming weeks!

New brand concept and colors

Read the rest of this entry »

How to recieve interesting tweets in your Twitter Stream.

Twitter’s updates have started to look like a stream of water flowing continuously. You get to see all kinds of interesting to stupid tweets. In this moving stream, its hard to find out tweets of your interest. Personally, when I see any interesting tweets, I click on the link, which takes me to the website, but when I like it and want to retweet them, I am lost :(. Ahh. Ya there are problems with these things.

But, I have found a way of getting interesting tweets on my stream. Well there is no trick here, its simply following interesting peoples. Ya you can wipe that disappointment from your face cause, following the right people is as hard as finding a water in the desert. Not to mention the RISE of BOTS in Twitter spamming with direct messages and redundant links.

Following Interesting people.

Log to buzzom.com and click on the People Search.

Right Hand side's menu bar

Now there are two ways to search for the people, through BIO or Tweets. You have to type the keyword that you are interested in. For me, lets see, Nanotechnology seems the hottest topic so I will go for it.

Search Text Bar

This will give you the list of people who have “Nanotechnology” or similar to “Nano” written in their profile. If you search by “Tweets”, you will recieve list of people whose tweets present Nanotechnology keyword. Here goes my list.

List of people from Search Result.

If you click on the detail, it will give you details of people. If you look at the list, you will find out that their are many interesting people related to nanotechnology. Now you just have to press the Follow button to start recieving their tweets. You can really enjoy this search, if you get the feel of it.

Just to show you how interesting it can get, I typed “Magician” in the search box to find out if their were any. Just what, this is the result.

Magician in Twitter

Conclusion

There are more to it that just search, for example, lets say, you want to learn Violin - OK why Violin, Don’t Ask me, its personal :). Just type of violinist and there you have it people who know about it. Follow them and get the most of it. Hasn’t the learning become so much interesting.

Being Thoughtful on Twitter : For Business.

With almost a year on twitter, there is always to tell something to the public. It feels as if you have mastered the area and call yourself an expert. But as always what ever you have learnt seems so less. In this trend of sharing with people, here are few things which I am putting forward, and its all about being thoughtful in Twitter:

So here are some of the well-known mantras of Twitter:

1. Start with clear and honest profile in the Twitter.

2. Do not miss in providing any useful information in your profile like:

a. Web Site Link

b. Blog Link

3. Have a decent twitter background picture that tells about your presence on the Twitter.

4. Start by following recommended users and other people.

5. Make your stand on the Twitter by providing your viewpoints.

6. Be Helpful, this is very important of all.

7. Spend time listening to people. This will:

a. Give a head start on posting your status

b. Give you opportunities to start a communication

c. Enhance your understanding of ways of communicating in Twitter

d. Grow your ability to track the essential tweets

e. Grow your Twitter’s vocabulary like : RT, (via .) etc

8. Install essential Twitter Desktop Applications to increase your tweeting efficiency. Here are few.

9. Subscribe to blogs related to Twitter and spend time reading them.

10. Track your performance by using different tools present in Internet. Here are few.

There are no limitations to the number of accounts you can create but it is recommended that as a person you do not create fake accounts just to receive more followers. Have your account for each Product or Service so that people know where to go for when they have problems. Introduce these twitter accounts to your followers and suggest them to follow for updates.

With all being said, I do not want to miss referring to our own application Buzzom. I humbly request readers to present their thoughts on it.