Twitter’s explosive growth in 2009 is a double edged sword. On the one hand it’s great that twitter has hit the mainstream and has a rapidly expanding user base. On the other hand the influx of new users is starting to make a loud background noise; new users are tweeting about how much they love the Jonas Brothers and tweeters with value to add are being drowned of attention by the likes of @iamdiddy (Puff Daddy) and @MileyCyrus. How twitter contends with this huge influx of people sharing links about their favourite celebrities could become a make or break moment for twitter’s social media value.A look at the front page of twiturly.com confirms the fear that twitter’s popularity could be its downfall, what used to be a page talking about interesting social media developments, funny links and interesting content, is now a popularity contest for celebrities. Pictures of the Jonas Brothers are a regular feature, along with the likes of Miley Cyrus and many other tween celebrities. These are precisely the kind of tweets that will begin to flood the twittersphere if the twitter community doesn’t drastically alter the way we aggregate and organise tweets.

Focus in the mainstream press has been on Ashton Kutcher, he’s the most popular tweeter, so by default he must be the most valuable. But is that really the case? Are people following Ashton Kutcher because he adds value or because he is popular? In his case it’s a combination of both, take a quick look at his twitter stream and you’ll see plenty of links to decent content. He does add value, but plenty of of the most popular people on twitter don’t add value, their popularity from old media spills over into the twittersphere. Social media has always been about value, boiled down to its core it’s just aggregated link sharing. Popularity is not aggrevated link sharing and does not equate to value. We have a problem.

The WeFollow top 25 is a well used reference for who is up and down in the twittersphere. As of today, out of the top 25 tweeters less than half add any meaningful value. The scientific basis of this analysis? My judgement, but let’s take a look.

@johncmayer “Question: can I get away with wearing the Staple x Mayer x Bayer tee? I lean towards no”

958,881 followers

@TheEllenShow “Tomorrow I’m celebrating Cinco de Mayo with Simon Cowell, Zachary Quinto, and Black Eyed Peas!”

1,336,088 followers

@BritneySpears “http://twitpic.com/469c6 – Paris Hilton watching Britney’s Circus tour in Vegas. See more at http://britneyspears.com“

1,320,990 followers

@the_real_shaq “Just got dat underwater ipod adaption device jammy so I can hear music unda water, I b aqua jammin, Waaaa Waaa Shaq-mu The quilla”

895,230 followers

@jimmyfallon “with Jessica and Jessica http://twitpic.com/4edrt“

906,683 followers

@iamdiddy “Is still up having Tantric sex! 12 hrs and counting!!!! Let’s go people!!!! You can do it! Just relax!! Lol”

815,055 followers

The problem stems from the twittersphere believing that the more followers you have, the more valuable a tweeter you are. It’s the same mind virus that saturated popular culture in the cable TV days where popularity was worshipped over value.  This needs to be realigned, how valuable you are depends on the quality of the content you tweet about, not how many people you get to listen to your mind burps.

@danzarrella,  a “social & viral marketing scientist” has done some fantastic work in trying to define the value of a tweeter. Zarrella hypothesises that a retweet is a good indication that the original tweet was valuable in some way since someone else liked it enough to pass it on. ReTweets are the driving force behind decent content coming through your twitter stream, so if you haven’t been taking part in ReTweets make a point of starting today. Based on his hypothesis Zarrella developed a formula to assess just how valuable your twitter stream is, he called this value your “Retweetability Metric”.

Zarrellas hasn’t got the huge bandwidth and computing power needed to apply this formula to the entire twittersphere but based on a large survey he produced a “top 100″ list of tweeters that looks entirely different to the WeFollow top 25. Check it out here.

WeFollow, or some other startup, should take on board the formula that Zarrella has put together and create a moving “top 25″ tweeters based on their Retweetability Metric, and this should become the first port of call for who’s hot and who’s not in the world of twitter. Second to this, twitter need to introduce a value as calculated by Zarrellas formula into twitter profiles. Maybe it could look like this:

If twitter picked this idea up it would give tweeters a real insentive to tweet valuable pieces of content, it would stem the virus of believing that popularity is the be all and end all, and it would give tweeters a much more accurate way of deciding whether or not you want to follow that person who’s part of the “social media marketing guru” plague who have 16,000 followers but tweet nothing but get rich quick schemes. Instead of the blogosphere producing endless discourse on “how to get more followers”, we might see a shift as people want to learn “how can I add more value?” In the long run, this is definitely the path that twitter needs to be on.

Hopefully Zarrella’s formula will mark the start of a new way of aggregating twitter content, his basic formula already produces good results but can you see a way in which it could be better?  What other factors could be brought into the formula to calculate value? Is there a better way of calculating it? Is a simple formula the best way to calculate value? There must be hundreds of SEO guys out there who’ve spent years finding loopholes in Googles ranking formula that can offer a valuable insight into how this formula might be improved.  If you do come up with any ideas we’d love to see them in a comment.