PR-firm Edelman has developed a new tool that measures an individual's importance or "gravitas" on Twitter using metrics that go beyond a mere tally of followers. The tool, Tweetlevel, joins a growing number of third party data mining and analysis tools developed to tease out user trends and influence on the popular microblogging site.

Importance and Trust 

Tweetlevel does take into account how many people are following a Twitter user. That number, though, is not the most important attribute the tool weighs, Instead, it places greater weight on what the tweeter says (importance), whether he or she actively participates within the community, and whether people believe what he or she is saying (trust). Each score is rated on a 100-point scale.

The highest rated Tweeters, according to Tweetlevel, are Perez Hilton (score: 86.5), Mashable (86.3) and Twitter Tips (85.2).

Edelman used Twitter's APIs in order to calculate the importance and trust components of the measurement.

Third-Party Measurement

Most of the third-party data mining tools developed for Twitter have built algorithms that incorporate these components. Some of these additional tools, in fact, are also used by Tweetlevel. Twitalyzer, for example, is an analytics application built by Web Analytics Demystified that layers on top of Twitter. It has a variety of functions, but most people use it to track their use of Twitter over time - benchmarking themselves against other Twitter users, and also to determine which social media strategies are working. One of its metrics, the signal-to-noise ratio, measures the tendency for people to pass information, as opposed to anecdote.

Another example is Twinfluence Rank, an automated third party party tool developed by Guy Hagen, president and founder of Innovation Insight. This tool uses APIs to measure influence and takes into account such factors as the quality of a group of followers.

Twitter Grader looks at a variety of factors including the number of followers, power of those followers and the level of engagement with the community.

Head to Head with Waggener

Earlier this year, Waggener Edstrom launched a similar data-mining platform called Twendz. Like Tweetlevel, it is free, although Karla Wachter, SVP at Waggener Edstrom told PR Week that the agency next week plans to launch a more robust paid version aimed at PR professionals.