This article was published on February 25, 2010

Just How Popular Are You? – How To Check Right Now


Just How Popular Are You? – How To Check Right Now

i love meIt’s no small secret that we all love ourselves, and that social media has provided us with new tools to stroke our own egos in powerful and wonderful ways.

So if you want to check out just how awesome you are, and I know you do, how do you go about doing it? Given that I am full-time narcissist, I can help you.

I have poked and prodded at any number of services and know the best of the lot. Let’s do this, broken down by your presence on each service, one at a time.

Just because everything is more fun as a game, we are calculating your popularity in ego points, so get a pen and pad and start counting!

Twitter

You’re Twitter account is most likely the central nexus of your social life, and given how public are its stats and APIs, it becomes on of the funnest to use to give your ego a quarter crank in the up direction.

  • Check your ratio. For every multiple of the people that you follow are following you, give yourself ten ego points. Now, give yourself another ten ego points per 50 lists that you are on. Fractions are of course allowed.
  • Twitalyzer is a killer fun service that will track your popularity on Twitter in literally a hundred different ways. Want to check your clout over the last thirty days? Check. It also checks your impact, influence, hell, even your generosity. Give yourself ten ego points whenever you smile broadly.
  • To round off your Twitter ego groping, head over to TweetStats to figure out just how addicted you are to the service. Track your follower count, and see who you retweet the most. You love yourself, right? So see what you are up to. The data just might surprise you. For every 250 tweets you send a month, ten ego points.

Facebook

We have to look at Facebook in two broad areas, your personal profile and your page. First, your personal page.

  • How many friends do you have? If you have over 500, take 20 ego points, and another ten points for every hundred friends you have over 500. Social media is often a numbers game, so get adding!
  • How many responses do you get on average for a post? Ten ego points for each. Go ahead and check your last five posts to get a fair average. Do people actually like you?
  • Finally, take one point for every friend recommendation you have, and five points for every pending friend request that you are ignoring.

For your Facebook page we have to do things differently.

  • Assuming that you are not actually famous (that’s cheating!), take five points per 10 ten fans that you have.
  • Look at your average interactions per week and take five points for each.
  • Finally, you lose five points for every person to un-fan you in the last week. Thems the breaks!

After you get don adding all that up, head over to Facebook Grader and grade both your profile and page. Ten points apiece if you get scores over 90. The service will also tell you what how many wall posts your personal page has received, ten points for every thousand!

Buzz

Given how new Buzz is, we can be a little nice on how we score you here.

  • Given that everyone picked up twenty followers or so when Buzz came out from their Gmail contacts, give yourself one point for every follower that you have over 20.
  • Subtract 5 points for every site that you have importing into Buzz. Lost twenty if you import your Twitter feed. Keeping the silos distinct is better in Buzz, so sayeth the experts.
  • Take another ten points if you have verified your Buzz profile, and minus ten if you have not. You can do that here.

The Others

We would be amiss to forget the other services around the internet. They might not be as large, but they can still carry serious weight. Take ten points for every service you use on this list:

Google

Google is of course the biggest (and most say best) search engine in the world. It handles more searches than even Superman could handle. You get to now do the most famous self-loving thing: Google yourself.

Go ahead, type your first and last name into Google and hit go. How to score:

  • Ten points for every first page link that is about you.
  • Five points for every second page link that is about you.
  • Two points for every mention from pages three to five.
  • Ten points if an image of you pops up in the first page of Google Image search.

Other Search Engines

Google may be the largest, but it is hardly the only search engine that exists. Go ahead and repeat the above experiment with Bing, Yahoo, and Ask. To score it, use the same guide, but with the points cut in half to reflect their smaller size.

Round Up

So what is your score? Over a hundred? Sound off in the comments.

After such a I-Love-Me orgy, you now need to head out to dinner with some friends and buy them a drink. You do not want your karma this out of whack for more than a few minutes. You might just get hit by a bus.

Image credit.

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