There’s a lot of press about how the CRM companies are offering Social CRM capabilities within their product offerings. Social media will increasingly be valuable for sales, service and marketing, so this is a good thing. When we (The TAS Group), implement our Sales Performance Automation solution, (Dealmaker) it often integrates with a company’s CRM system, so naturally I’m interested in how well the CRM companies are using social media themselves. There’s an interesting site, called www.grader.com that grades your performance on Twitter, Facebook etc., so I plugged in some Twitter ids into that and I created a table of the results.
Note: I included Dave Stein, Sirius Decisions (Joe Galvin’s company), and the Sales 2.0 Network as reference points.
There are just over 2.2 million registered Twitter IDs, and Grader analyzes your Twitter activity against everyone elses. Here’s what it says about its algorithm. It might not be perfect – but its a reference point to see how you are doing.
Algorithm Factors1. Number of Followers: More followers leads to a higher Twitter Grade (all other things being equal). Yes, I agree that it’s easy to game this number, but we are looking at measuring reach and I did say all other things being equal.
2. Power of Followers: If you have people with a high Twitter Grade following you, it counts more than those with a low Twitter Grade following you. It’s a bit recursive, and we don’t get carried away with it, but it helps.
2. Updates: More updates generally leads to a higher grade — within reason. This does not mean you should be tweeting like a manic squirrel cranked up on caffeine and sugar. It won’t help either your Twitter Grade or your overall happiness in life.
3. Update Recency: Users that are more current (i.e. time elapsed since last tweet is low) generally get higher grades.
4. Follower/Following Ratio: The higher the ratio, the better. However, the weight of this particular factor decreases as the user accrues points for other factors (so, once a user gets to a high level of followers or a high level of engagement, the Follower/Following ratio counts less).
5. Engagement: The more a given user’s tweets are being retweeted, the more times the user is being referenced or cited, the higher the twitter grade. Further, the value of the engagement is higher based on who is being engaged. If a user with a very high Twitter Grade retweets, it counts more than if a spammy account with a very low grade retweets.
The Grade Calculation: So, those are the factors that go into the calculation of a score. This score is then used to compare a user against all other users that also have a score. The grade is calculated as the approximate percentage of other users that have an equal or lower score. So, a Twitter Grade of 80 means that about 80% of the other users got a lower score. At the time this article is being written, over 2.1 million users have been graded.