Measuring the Twitter profile of PA political candidates

 By Triad Strategies President Roy J. Wells

Today I provided our readers with another snapshot of the social media presence of the candidates for Governor and U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. Though it is relatively easy to assess the standing of the candidates on Facebook by simply counting the number of fans someone has (I believe fans is a misnomer since you do not need to be a “fan” of someone in order to be interested in what they are saying), it is not as easy with Twitter. The total number of people you are following – or are following you – does not easily translate into who is most effectively using the technology. So, how do you measure the value of your Twitter profile? A number of unique tools have been developed in order to measure the influence, popularity, clout, ranking, and trust of people on Twitter. I thought today we could examine how the candidates stack up by using one of these tools.

Tweet Level developed by the public relations firm Edelman looks at four factors; (1) Influence, the primary ranking metric, measuring that what you say is interesting and that many people listen to it; (2) Popularity, the number of people that follow you; (3) Engagement, that you actively participate within your community; and (4) Trust, that people believe what you say. Each score is rated out of 100 – in other words, the higher your score, the more important you are on Twitter.

Tweet Level scores for the US Senate Race:

In the race for governor:

In the US Senate race the scores are relatively close though Senator Specter leads in each of the four measurements.  In the race for Governor, Sam Rohrer is the leader on the Republican side, while Joe Hoeffel has the higher scores on the Democratic side.  By way of comparison, Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts has the following scores: