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I want to calculate the reach of a person's account on Twitter on a daily basis.
For this, we can have these variables:

  • Number of followers of a person.
  • Number of status posted on a day.
  • Number of retweets made to the person's status.
  • Number of mentions made to the person.

Retweets are made when a follower like a person's status and reproduce it in his/her account. Mentions are made when a follower says something to a person. Followers may increase dramatically when good statuses are posted.

In my view a good reach is when a person gets a high number of retweets and mentions at first and high amount of followers in a day. But all of these depends on the number of the statuses posted that day.

I do not know what is the best method to calculate this, so I am seeking for your help.

Thank you.

For example I would like to calculate on a scale of 1 to 100 the "reach" of 5 statuses that gained 4 retweets and 6 mentions. Additionally 20 new followers made that day (for example from 400 -> 420 ). How good is that?

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This is an extensive question that could require weeks, if not months, of dedicated numerical analysis of several hundred or so twitter accounts... I'm not sure if this is appropriate for Math SE. – 000 Apr 17 '12 at 22:38
@Limitless where should I look for help ? – Kaoukkos Apr 17 '12 at 22:53
Well, what you're looking at here is akin to predicting the stock market. While, yes, the complexity of the stock market is largely on a different magnitude than the complexity of Twitter, this endeavor is along those same lines. My best advice to you would be formulating a very definitive definition of what you want to calculate and consulting a group of statisticians. You would definitely have to pay for their work, assuming they could succeed at such a difficult task. – 000 Apr 17 '12 at 22:57
@Limitless Thank you for this, I may look for a "very definitive definition" at this early stage. – Kaoukkos Apr 17 '12 at 23:02
You are welcome. To help not sound so guilty of redundancy in that trio of words, I should probably elaborate: By definitive, I mean something that is very objective. For example, if by reach you were interested in how many followers a person has in regions in the world and how dense their following is in particular spots, that would be very appropriate for a statistician to work with. (I am not a statistician, so this is my hopefully logical guess.) If you wished to carry this further and attempt to calculate how fast a person receives followers from particular areas, this, too, [. . .] – 000 Apr 17 '12 at 23:07
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