

Ask HN: is there a Twitter hashtag reach vanity metric? - ajcronk

Let's say Subway does a Twitter campaign using the hastag #hooraysubway.  Is there a site where you can input a hashtag and see everyone who has tweeted it and sum their followers?<p>This campaign "reach" number is mostly a vanity metric, but could be useful for justifying costs to brands.
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uuid
Doing the math roughly is actually easy. Every tweet that doesn't come from
search endpoints has the user details inline. The user details include the
number of followers.

So just consume the filter streaming api with your chosen hashtag. You will
get all the tweets, or at least some and a measure of how many you missed
(limit notices).

For every new user in said stream, add the number of her followers.

It's so easy you could write the code in the length of this comment. Of
course, if you want to avoid counting duplicate followers, you'd have to do an
average of 1-2 additional calls per user.

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rhl
Well, total reach might be tough to pull off, but it would be definitely
feasible to poll the Twitter API every hour and count the tweets with that
hashtag that appeared in that time span.

To justify cost to brands it might be easier/more 'sellable' to insist on
actual, measurable engagement (links clicked, tweets retweeted, tweets
favorited etc.) around their own tweets. I'd worry about unrelated tweets
(i.e. sharing the same keyword but about something else altogether), or either
bad publicity being accounted for.

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mgrouchy
We currently don't do that, but its in the pipe for us at SWIX (
<http://www.swixhq.com> ), those types of metrics and many more.

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dacort
<http://tweetreach.com> will do this. The basic/free version only looks at the
50 most recent tweets, but they _gasp_ charge for more. Amazing...a Twitter
app that charges! Novel! ;)

