This report, normally published on Tuesday, is delayed this week due to our return trip from D.C. We had a fine time, meeting with various people and organizations, and it seems our methods for using Twitter are about to spread.
We're still learning as we go on this system and there is leg work involved in keeping Twitter names coherent as accounts get renamed, political figures in one office chose to also run for another, and so forth. Don't be shy about mentioning any errors or omissions
What you see here are a hotlink to the politician's Twitter ID, their real name, their district or state, a hot link to their @Klout, their friends (mutual follower/following), their followers, and their True Reach. Klout is a computationally complex, slow to change, hard to game set of metrics and we believe it to be the best publicly available measure of a Twitter account's effectiveness.
We don't provide all of the Klout metrics in tabular form, just the ones we believe to be most relevant for political figures. The relationship between follower count and True Reach is the key to understanding how effective a public figure actually is. There are many, many junk followers on Twitter – accounts driven not by engaged humans but by software. These systems hunt for key words or phrases and then follow those using them – these are often subtle sales pitches.
True Reach measures not followers, but followers who are actually paying attention. Watching those who retweet, or respond, or ask a question of a given account is a far better metric of how well the account is interacting with constituents than a simple raw follower count. If True Reach is zero, per Klout founder @JoeFernandez this indicates that the account is too thinly engaged to have a score. This lack of engagement is, in our opinion, a hazard to the Democratic majority.
Democratic Senators
Democratic House