Tracking Your Twitter Growth With Twitterholic, TwitDir, Tweeterboard & Others

I blame Jason Calacanis for making me think about the number of Twitter followers I have. He wants to be the number one Twitterer in terms of followers, as measured by Twitterholic. Currently, he’s number two. I saw him in New York last month, and he talked much about he wanted to raise his “Jason Nation” numbers.

Hmm. How was my Twitter account I doing? And could I make this leaderboard? Because maybe that would be kind of cool….

So I spent some time at Twitterholic. It’s neat. It will show you the top 100 people based on followers. You can also resort to see those with the most friends or those who have updated the most.

At the moment, the person (Zadi) in spot 100 has 2,616 followers. I just turned over 1,800, so maybe I’ll make it some day. But unfortunately, I can’t tell all the other people behind him. You can’t see past the top 100.

On the upside, you can see the trend for anyone on Twitter. Apparently this isn’t commonly known, so I thought I’d do a post.

Let’s take Jason, who is at spot two. His Twitterholic URL is like this:

http://twitterholic.com/twitter/JasonCalacanis/

Now want to see your own stats? Just put your own Twitter name after the /twitter/ part, like this:

http://twitterholic.com/twitter/INSERT-YOUR-NAME-HERE

Here’s me:

http://twitterholic.com/twitter/dannysullivan

You can see my growth charted, plus get numbers for each day. I also like how it tells you when you joined at the top of the page:

Danny Sullivan was the 858,051st person to sign up for twitter!

I haven’t spent much time with some of the other services, since the current competition (Jason, out to beat Barack Obama and Robert Scoble) has focused much on Twitterholic. But I did some poking around further today.

A showdown of Twitter user directories – TwitDir vs. Twitterholic at TwitTown pointed me over to TwitDir. It has a top 100 list, and that list is ever-so-slightly fresher than Twitterholic. However, I found the site slower to load. And sadly, like Twitterholic, you can’t go past the top 100.

This is kind of odd, because on the TwitDir “tops” page, they show a Top 1000 figure. And if you look yourself up, you might find you’re shown as being in the top 1000. See, here’s me — there’s a little Top 1000 icon next to my followers number. So let’s have a way to drill into that! If you want it, consider donating to support the site.

Over at Jason’s Mahalo, I skimmed the big page about Twitter and came across Tweeterboard. I’d actually been to it before. The idea here is to show top Twitterers by reputation. If you’re involved in a lot of conversations, people calling out to you with @, then you might be deemed as having some notability.

I actually found the individual profile pages at Tweeterboard the most interesting thing. For example, here’s TechCrunch:

http://tweeterboard.com/user/techcrunch

Click on the “Gets Love” tab, and you can see the people TechCrunch has most called out to. Heh. I top the list with all of three references.

The “Gives Love” tab shows you who talks to TechCrunch the most. That would be Michael Gray at the moment.

Yes, there’s a Top 100 list. Remember the reputation thing? This list is ordered by that, rather than pure followers. That’s kind of cool because while Barack Obama at the top of Tweeterholic, he doesn’t seem to talk much to others. I know this, because I follow him, and it’s been pretty quiet. The campaign and all. And here’s a tip. Want an instant friend? Friend Obama, and he’ll friend you back immediately. How he does this when he’s so busy campaigning, I don’t know. OK, I do know — there’s a robot. But hey, I’m for Obama in the election, so I’m cool with robot Obama on Twitter

So want to make the Tweeterboard list? Look at the last person on it and see their reputation score., Currently, hmason is there with 34.

Now see if you’re listed — there’s a user search box on the site. Only about 3,000 or so Twitters are followed. Hey! I‘m one of them.

At 31 reputation points, the list is potentially within reach. If only some of those more reputable people would talk to me. Well, if you’re really wanting to be there, I’d friend a number of people on the list and start talking to them through Twitter about something interesting, of course. Me, I see DoshDosh there, and he’s always busy on our Sphinn site, so clearly Dosh, I need to talk to you more!

How about the other lists, based on pure followers. If I really were that obsessed, I’d just start following everyone I could. There’s a guilt factor many on Twitter report, that if someone friends you, you have to friend them back. So friend someone or two or three, and you might go up in the figures.

That kind of makes you wonder if there should be another score, maybe a ratio of friends to followers. I mean Twitterholic says Robert Scoble has 19,000 friends. How’s he keeping up with them all? And Jason has like 16,000. Will they really see and care about what all those “friends” are doing?

I suspect they’re taking notifications only from some of them. Otherwise, you’d get swamped. Me personally, I have about 100 friends. I really depend on keeping up with followers and others not on my friend list by if they call me out with an @dannysullivan. That puts them on my “Replies” tab, which I watch regularly.

And should we even care who is the top Twitterer? Not that much, but it can be kind of fun or interesting. Should you feel bad if you’re not? Of course not. I think people use Twitter in various ways, and as long as you’re getting what you want out of it, who cares if you’re “tops” or not. You’re tops in your own book!

Oh, and if you do want to follow me, I’m here.