Authority- and influence-measuring tools like Klout, mPACT, TunkRank and PeerIndex are all the rage in social media, but they can be controversial.
Some marketers feel they are a convenient way to identify influentials with whom to engage. Others feel their proprietary algorithms are useless, reducing something as subjective as online influence to a simple number. The fact remains: We are humans, and we love rankings. And with almost 7,500 views, the popularity of Intouch’s TweetPharm is further proof of our love of easily quantifiable statistics.
Intouch introduced TweetPharm in 2010 as a fun and free way for the industry to track pharmaceutical companies' use of Twitter. TweetPharm aggregates real-time Twitter information of pharma companies into an easy-to-read dashboard and interactive "visualizer."
And with our latest release, we’re adding a new feature called TweetPharm Rank, a visualization that compares, sorts and now ranks these pharma Twitter handles based on a simple formula.
Introducing TweetPharm Rank
We use the Twitter API to gather six variables: number tweets, number of followers, number the handle is following, and now, with this new release, we also factor in retweets received, number of tweets that have been favorited (Listed count), and retweets given.
We track both year-to-date numbers and the past 10 days (rolling). We average each variable for each Twitter handle, so this data is comparative of only those Twitter handles listed and none outside this list. We then apply a multiplication factor — a weighting — to the average of each variable. This weighting is a proxy for importance, and we arrived at them after much debate:
In other words, we believe the retweeting of their messages is the most important factor to consider when comparing pharma-company Twitter activity, whereas the total number of handles a pharma company is following is least important.
We then apply one more weighting to account for our belief that recent activity is more important than total activity. The total weighted averages for year-to-date data are multiplied by .33, and the total weighted averages for past 10 days are multiplied by .66. Those new totals are added, and — voila — we have the final TweetPharm Rank!
So how do the Twitter handles fare? Who’s on top, and who needs help? You can see a visualization of the rankings here or retrieve a printable graph here.
According to our new TweetPharm Rank feature, @Accesspharma is the most engaged
We love pharma, we love social media, and we love helping pharma join the conversation. We also love creating conversation, so our goal with this release is to have a dialogue with you.
We encourage you to contact us if there are any accounts that we may have missed. Our inclusion criteria is currently defined as active, English-language, U.S. or global major pharma/biotech or medical device corporate account and does not include niche, brand, disease category or campaign accounts.
We would love to hear from members of the industry. What do you think of the formula? How could it be tweaked? What can we do in future to make this tool more valuable?