Which China Twitterati are Twittering the most?

Christine Lu (of China Business Network) compiled a great list of the (primarily English-language) China Twitterati on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter and am interested in China, go follow the Twitterati on the ChinaList!

Over the weekend, Louis Gray posted on the Twitter Noise Ratio — defined as the ratio of Updates to Followers — to contrast the “Listeners” (low Noise Ratio) from the “Megaphones” (high Noise Ratio). Naturally there was a bit of controversy about this measure! But it inspired me to measure up the ChinaList and see what I could find.

So what about the China Twitterati? Is this Twitter With Chinese Characteristics?

Here’s what I found about the ChinaList.

• The Super Twitterati. As measured by either Updates, Followers, or both, there are a few Super Twitter users: @thecarol, @isaac, @christinelu, @flypig, @webleon, @bbluesman! Wow. I am not worthy.
• In General, there is a wide variation of usage of Twitter among the ChinaList. Clearly there is no one best way to use Twitter. It is entirely between you, yourself, and your Followers!
• The Top Updaters. Some but not all of these Super Twitterati are among the prolific Top Updaters among the China Twitterati. The top 10 are @flypig, @webleon, @bbluesman, @christinelu, @DavidFeng, @isaac, @marcvanderchijs, @dimi3, @ericgonzalez, and @shanghaiist.
• The Top “Megaphones” among us (to use Louis’ controversial measure of Updates per Followers) are: @kevinkoo, @dimi3, @DavidFeng, @flypig, @siumuimui, @webleon, @bbluesman, @shanghaiist, @expatacular, and @Guerel. This group has a ratio of 15.6 Updates per Follower, vs. the median of 3.2 Updates per Follower! This is nearly five times the median! As my co-blogger DavidFeng says to his new Followers, “Get ready for your arrival!”
• The “Listeners” among us are: @kriadam, @ionchina, @djsircharles, @ThomasCrampton, @nicolasz, @ChinaTechToday, @chinapolarbear @JakeNewby, @anguslau, @Agraylin, @Neocha
• The “Moderates”, who have a Noise Ratio of near the median of 3.2 Updates/Follower include: @thehumanaught, @dedlam, @papajohn, @ajschokora, @jputman. @pandapassport, @msittig, @samflemming, @PhilipJohnson8, @ChinaMatt

The rest of this post has 2 cool charts and 4 leaderboards, including the entire ChinaList ranked by Followers at the end.

Chart 1: Updates vs. Followers – The Super China Twitterati of the ChinaList

This chart plots each member of the ChinaList with total Updates on the Y axis and total Followers on the X axis. All data is of 4/27/2008. This chart shows the emergence of Six Super Twitter users: @thecarol, @isaac, @christinelu, @flypig, @webleon, @bbluesman.

What’s the yellow shaded area? The majority of the 92 ChinaList Twitterati are in the shaded yellow area and I’ve created a separate chart for that area.

This data that produced this graph can be critiqued as not considering the length of time that people have been on Twitter. So for example, @thecarol may have joined 2 months ago and may be tweeting more rapidly than @flypig but he may have been on Twitter for a much longer time. What would be more interesting would be to graph Updates/Month vs. Follower Growth/Month. But the data are not available to do this.

Chart 2: Updates vs. Followers – The Rest of Us China Twitterati (the shaded yellow section in the above chart).

Because the Super Twitterati are such outliers, I expanded the chart to include only the mainstream China Twitterati.

Some of the more prolific Twitterati include @DavidFeng, @Marcvanderchijs, @shanghaiist, @dimi3, @ericgonzalez, @sioksiok, @zjjtrans, @kevinkoo, @shanghaiist, and @FonsTuinstra.

Leaderboard 1: Top 10 with Most Followers

He who ends up with the most followers does not win!

Most people might think “most followers” is the goal of Twitter, but Robert Scoble convincingly argues that its not about how many followers you have, but how many people you follow. That’s why he is following 21,000 people and tweets roll about 1 tweet/second on his GTalk screen! In fact, some of us (here, here, and here) wonder if he is a Cylon. If you worried about not having enough followers, please read his post and focus on following the right people, not about trying to win a popularity contest. Especially if you’re a Cylon.

In my own experience, I feel Followers is a function of the time that you have been on Twitter and how much you interact with other people who happen to have lots of Followers. I’m sure @ChristineLu retweeting my tweets and posts have resulted in a ton of new Followers for me, for example. Thanks Christine!

Leaderboard 2: Top 10 with Most Updates

Is there Life outside of Twitter? Ask these prolific Tweeters. Again, this metric is not entirely meaningful because it doesn’t capture the rate of increase of tweets. Either these folks have been on Twitter for a long time, OR they are prolific updaters, so be forewarned if you follow them! My dirty non-harmonious secret: I have actually unfollowed 1 of these people because they are too “noisy” for me, because they use TwitterFeed to feed all of their blog posts on Twitter! (But I follow the rest!)

Leaderboard 3: Top 10 Updates/Follower (aka Twitter Noise! according to LouisGray)

There is a lot of criticism of the Twitter Noise Ratio measure on FriendFeed and at Louis Gray’s post. Updates include the @ messages that you might send to a specific Follower or Twitterer. So as you get into more conversations, Louis’ measure would condemn you as “noisy!” Stowe Boyd has a different measure called Conversation Index that may be better but is not possible to measure easily. This Conversational Index is expressed like this:

Boyd’s Twitterized Conversational Index = (number of replies made by followers / number of tweets)

This is similar to measuring the number comments a blogger gets on a post. The more comments, the more reader engagement. Boyd is suggesting that the more @replies, the more your Followers are engaged and interested by your Tweets.

Also, I suggested that “Total Updates/Month” or “General Updates/Month” might be a better measure, but there are no historical Twitter stats to my knowledge.

What Twitter Metrics Matter? What’s interesting about how you or your fellow China Twitterati use Twitter? What might you change about how you use Twitter?

Karl Marx, in his famous Theses on Feuerbach, said, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.” I hope that this interpretation of the world will allow you to change it in your small way. On Twitter. :)

Finally, here is the entire list ordered by Followers:

Leaderboard 4: Entire China Twitterati List on ChinaList, sorted by Followers

Here is the Source Spreadsheet for ChinaList Twitterati 20080427 with all this data in case you are interested in it. Use it under Creative Commons license, by-sa-nc 3.0 with attribution to Elliott Ng, CNReviews.com.

UPDATE 4/28:  From the bully pulpit of Ogilvy Digital Watch, Kaiser Kuo wrote an excellent post discussing the trend of blogging about Twitter as dangerous self-referential narcissism and the risks of “excitable dorkitude,”:

Each to his own, of course. But am I wrong in thinking that there’s something not quite healthy and weirdly solipsistic about this? Mind you, I do find Twitter useful, as I made clear in a post of mine last week – a post which, as if to prove the point it made, rode a wave of Twitter-distribution to become one of my most widely-read posts to date. But if we all start looking like a bunch of excitable dorks (which many clearly are) we’ll scare away people who actually might make truly useful contributions – links to great stories, life hacks, great recommendations on apps or software or books or eats, real insights into the things that matter: things predicated on actually having a life.

Guilty as charged.  Kaiser earlier post about the myriad uses of Twitter notwithstanding, I concur with his latest view that indeed there is life outside of Twitter.