March 3rd, 2009 | by Jennifer Van Grove5 Comments
Dan Zarrella, Mashable contributor and self-proclaimed viral marketing scientist, is applying his science of retweets to a newly launched site, the ReTweetability Index.
The ReTweetability Index isn’t just a list showing the top Twitterers or the ones with the most retweets, but a formula carefully researched to better get at the most retweetable and influential users.
The formula measures and ranks Twitter users based on the power of their tweets, which takes into account retweets per day, average tweets per day, and total followers. The final output is a ReTweetability index number, with higher numbers indicating that a user has a higher percentage of being retweeted.
Using the site, you’ll quickly be able to pinpoint any users’ retweetable rank (including your own), and you can search for the most retweetable users by topic.
For example, my ReTweetability score is 2403.94 (current rank 5,556) which is calculated using the formula above and multiplying that number by 10,000.
When doing a search on social media as topic, you’ll find that the Mashable Twitter account ranks the highest (overall ranked 3) with an index of 790,870 (nicely done, Pete!). The numbers may seem a little complicated, but once you start playing around with the site you’ll start to get a feel for individuals with the most overall and subject matter influence.
Zarrella explains a little more of the science behind the ReTweetability metric in his own blog post on the site launch, saying “The ReTweetability metric I’m using for the index right now is based on the natural logarithm of both the follower and tweets-per-day numbers. This is done to compress the range of variation in those two variables while acounting for the power law shaped graph displayed by the distributions of both.”
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