Using the occasion of the announcement by Twitter that it has rebuilt its i-Pad app “from the ground up” to provide an update to last week’s posting on FDA’s twitter feeds and their influence as measured by Kred.
Assessing influence is, of course, important. I am still feeling my way around in the use of tools to assess relative influence – and also who influences who – particularly when developing media lists.
One of the questions that arose after posting the various FDA twitter feeds (which are collected into a list where you can see just FDA tweets on this Eye on FDA Twitter list) is how FDA’s feeds stack up against other federal health agencies. Below is an update to the list that provides some comparisons to some other large government sponsored Twitter feeds.
The comparison reveals that FDA’s primary twitter feed (which was less followed than its feed for FDA_Recalls) has a score that is below most other agencies. But also noteworthy is that the Outreach score, which measures the sociability of a feed as expressed through the “generous act” of re-tweeting or replying, is on the low side at 3, particularly when compared to the apparently very social CDC feed which has a 6 – for more on this, see the Kred blog post “How We Calculate Kred Outreach“. (Note, the current highest is 12.)
You may be asking yourself, why does this matter. It may not. But as the medium of Twitter increases in its role (and I teach my class that Twitter has emerged as one of the most important media platforms that exists today), measurement of impact and influence – both of others and one’s self, is also going to grow in importance.
