What’s Tim’s Influence?

Asking how many of your tweets get retweeted is really just another way of measuring your own influence. If you tweet a lot and nobody retweets you, it’s safe to say that your influence is pretty weak—at least as a Twitterer. In fact, it would be somewhat of a paradox to find yourself having the good fortune of many followers but not many retweets, because you generally get followers and retweets for the very same reason: you’re interesting and influential!

One base metric that’s quite simple and inexpensive to calculate is the ratio of tweets to retweets. A ratio of 1 would mean that every single tweet you’ve authored was retweeted and indicate that your influence is strong—potentially having second- and third-level effects that reach millions of unique users (literally)—while values closer to 0 show weaker influence. Of course, given the nature of Twitter, it’s highly unlikely than any human user would have a tweet-to-retweet ratio of 1, if for no other reason than the mechanics of conversation (@replies) would drive the ratio downward. Twitter exposes the statuses/retweets_of_me resource, which provides the authenticating user with insight on which of her tweets have been retweeted. However, we don’t have access to that API to analyze Tim’s retweets, so we need to look for another outlet.