At last week’s SSP conference in San Francisco, those of us interested in Altmetrics were rather excited to see representatives from each of the major products come together in a session entitled ‘Metrics 2.0: It’s about Time…..and People’.

First up was Andrea Michalek of Plum Analytics (who kindly shared her slides here). She revealed a sneak preview of work being done with the The Smithsonian, one of Plum’s first customers. Their product, PlumX, is being used to collect data (usage, captures, mentions, social media, citations) in order to generate reports on publication activity in support of research evaluation.

She explained how in scholarly communications, the same article can be published in multiple locations on the web (e.g. publisher website, PubMed Central, Mendeley). Fortunately, Plum collects and displays the counts from each of these individual locations, allowing users to get a full view of the engagement surrounding a particular article, video, presentation etc. Indeed, she stressed the importance of tracking the impact of all aspects of output, not just the article. She spoke of these ’2nd level metrics’ and used the example of an author who blogs about his/her research.

Next to speak was Euan Adie of Altmetric.com. He described his product as being more focused on publishers than researchers, which differentiates it from the other altmetric providers on the panel. He stressed that altmetrics are not identifiers of quality, the same way that citations are not. He went on to explain that articles that received the most online attention may well attract the ‘wrong’ audience and often contain populist terms like sex, coffee or cannabis in their title (more on this on the Altmetric.com blog).

Euan also presented a new feature that has been introduced around mentions in policy documents; clear indicators of impact that are not picked up by citations. While papers usually have 50% of the tweets they will ever receive in the first three days after publication, this is not so with policy documents. He presented an interesting example and asked where the evidence for the UK’s diabetes type 2 treatment guidelines comes from? Whilst the Lancet received 11% of the citations and the BMJ 9%, smaller journals also had an impact, such as CRMO, which received 2.6% (25 citations). Tracking this new metric will help us to surface the impact that smaller journals are having.

Jason Priem differentiated ImpactStory from the others by stressing that it was a non-profit organisation. Also, rather than focusing on traditional outputs, ImpactStory is interested in identifying alternative ways to measure and understand the new ecosystem of the Web. Just as the printing press transformed publishing, so too will the Web (to a larger degree than it has already). He explained that the Web is so powerful because there’s one bucket that contains everything. The  future of altmetrics should be the same and there needs to be an open infrastructure that can be built on top of (more on this later).

He raised an interesting issue about inconsistent results between different altmetric tracking systems. Why would a paper have different scores on altmetric.com and ImpactStory? Whilst he didn’t exactly answer the question, he did point to the fact that citation tracking services can also be wildly inconsistent, without causing too much inconvenience to researchers.

He showed an interesting example of how ImpactStory was being used. The UK Parkinson’s Disease Consortium at UCL have integrated ImpactStory into their publications page in order to show the impact of their output. This is especially important as they are trying to gain funding for further research.

Martin Fenner of PLOS was the final speaker. He reiterated that whilst there was a good deal of overlap between the various altmetric providers, there are significant differences (PLOS’ being that it is a publisher rather than a third party service). He ran through the various aspects of the PLOS article-level metric reports, including the ability to aggregate up statistics from specific sets of articles.  He stressed the importance of visualising data and showed an impressive 4D bubble chart showing total views, months, scopus ctitations and journal name.

Q&A

I’ve tried to capture some of the key points from the lively Q&A session that followed the main presentations:

• Although tweets may contain negative rather positive sentiment, altmetrics looks at a correlation of data points rather than just one metric. Also, it can sometimes be useful to see the negative impact.
• Authors really like to track their impact. However, this is not just vanity – they want feedback on their work.
• Researchers who have prospered in the traditional system of citations tend to be less enthusiastic about alternative metrics. Fans are often younger and more experimental users.
• Funders, such as the National Institutes of Health, are also enthusiasts as they need to show the value of the money they are spending.
• In terms of historical data, it’s very difficult to go back beyond a certain point. Twitter doesn’t even store data for more than 2 years. Altmetric.com goes back the furthest (to July 2011).

Towards the end of the session, a  representative from Emerald Group Publishing asked whether we will we need an aggregator to bring together all of the statistics provided by the (slightly confusing) array of altmetric services. Jason Priem’s response to this was really insightful. He expressed the desire for another party to build a ‘Google of altmetrics’ on top of all altmetric providers. He doesn’t see ImpactStory as being the end solution, more part of the infrastructure. It will certainly be interesting to see who and when somebody will step up to this challenge!

Since 1840, BMJ has been a trusted voice in the development of improved healthcare. We are proud of our heritage but also believe in looking forward. Our objective remains to support medical professionals and organisations in continuously improving the delivery of quality healthcare. By sharing our information, analytical tools and technology during an upcoming hack day (6-7 July), BMJ seeks to help healthcare professionals and organisations improve the care they provide.

What is a hack day?

A hack day (also known as a hackathon, hackfest or codefest) is an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, collaborate intensively on software projects. We’re working with Rewired State,  an organisation that runs hack days, and curates a network of more than 1,000 software developers and designers. Their clients include government bodies, large private companies, conferences and charities. They were behind National Hack the Government Day, currently in its fourth year. The first event was “the catalyst for the landmark site data.gov.uk and is widely acknowledged as the inspiration behind the UK government’s open data efforts.”

What are we looking for?

We’re inviting interested developers to focus on four categories:

1.   Digital Medical Students

Whether they’re in the lecture theatre or carrying out early rotations in A&E, what innovative applications could be built to create better doctors for our future healthcare needs?

2.   Create a ‘zero harm’ NHS

What could be done to prevent more unnecessary deaths, such as those seen at Mid Staff NHS Foundation Trust? There are 290 recommendations arising from the Francis report, which aims to create a ‘zero harm’ NHS.  Some recommendations have already been rejected or watered down in the government’s response. What innovative approaches can be used to kick start these recommendations, taking a radically different approach to traditional NHS technology procurement?

3.   Localise content through collaboration

Many developing countries look to westernised countries for the evidence on which to base their care. UK published materials, such as BMJ Best Practice, can provide healthcare professionals with a sound knowledge base but they need localisation to reflect not only differences in the prevalence of diseases but also in treatment options and how these treatments are delivered.

The challenge of localising content is significant. The cost of physical human translation is enormous and alongside the risk of mis­translating a key clinical concept or drug dose which could result in a loss of human life, to date it has not been considered commercially viable, if technically possible. Can crowdsourcing ever be applied to such a task, and if so, how would it work?

4.   Revolutionise the scholarly publishing process

The classical scholarly publishing model has not changed radically since the nineteenth century. A key criticism is the requirement to reduce years worth of research into a restrictive, text-based end product; the article of record. How could we capture more of the research process and enable collaboration before and after publication?

Logistics

Judges will also be announced soon.

This will be a two day hack, with overnight for those wanting it at Hub Westminster, London, on the weekend of 6th/7th July.

Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) (subject to final confirmation): Content creators retain IPRs over original/hack day created code.

Code: Open-sourced with repositories publicly available encouraged.

Register for BMJ Hack Day >> 

Hack4ac – eLife

Also taking place on the Saturday is Hack4ac, which presents a great opportunity for collaboration over the two hack events. Hack4ac will focus on the journal and content side, and the BMJ hack day is going to focus on medical data and hacks that could help with front line patient support.

They have two goals:

• Demonstrate the value of the CC-BY licence within academia. We are interested in supporting innovations around and on top of the literature.
• Reach out to academics who are keen to learn or improve their programming skills to better their research. We’re especially interested in academics who have never coded before.

We are going to coordinate on the weekend of the event, and in the run-up to see if we can cross-fertilise ideas. We will be announcing a pub event in the run-up to the weekend so register above to receive updates.

This week has seen a flurry of activity on Twitter owing to a series of separate but related events highlighting trends in scholarly communication and research data. The fun kicked off with Wednesday’s ‘Now and Future of Data Publishing’ event organised by the Jisc Managing Research Data programme. It was followed on Thursday by the  ORCID Outreach Meeting, Getting Credit for Your Work: A Symposium on Research Attribution (jointly organised by Dryad and ORCID) and concludes with today’s Dryad Membership Meeting.

An obvious but important message that underpinned discussions on all three days was the importance of sharing data.  On the first morning, Simon Hodson of Jisc quoted Geoffrey Boulton of the Royal Society (who have made sharing data a condition of publication): “Publishing articles without making the data available is scientific malpractice.” This is an extreme but not uncommon view.

Trish Groves, deputy editor of the BMJ, recently wrote a summary of recent and future developments around sharing clinical data. The big news our end is that we now require authors of drug and devices trials to deposit their anonymised patient level data—on reasonable request. However, our interest in data publication started back in 2009 when we first incorporated data sharing statements into all BMJ research papers. More recently, we have encouraged our authors to deposit their data in Dryad and the first article to link through to a Dryad dataset was published by BMJ Open in 2011. We now have just under 40 papers with links to datasets on Dryad.

BMJ is by no means the only publisher experimenting with how best to integrate associated research data into published articles. While we link through to individual data sets on Dryad from our data sharing statements, there are a number of other options being developed.

I first blogged about FigShare back in Feb 2012. Since then, they’ve collaborated with a number of big publishers, including PLOS, Faculty of 1000 and Nature Publishing Group. They offer a distinctly unique set of embeddable widgets, which allow readers to view the underlying data within the article view rather than clicking through to a separate website (see an example from PLOS below).

FigShare is also collaborating with Nature Publishing Group (NPG) on Scientific Data, one of a new breed of data journals for articles describing datasets deposited elsewhere, including biomedical research data. Notably, it will not be a condition of publication that any papers referring to the datasets be published in NPG journals.

As more funders and learned societies call for new ways to make research data more available, reusable and reproducible, it will be interesting to see how established and emerging platforms will work with researchers and publishers to make access to data as pain-free as possible.

In the past month, almost 1 million new magazines have appeared on Apple’s iPad. Rather than heralding a long-awaited comeback from traditional publishers, nearly all of these collections of articles, photos and social-media updates are the handiwork of ‘armchair editors’, using a new tool from the social magazine app, Flipboard.

Magazines on Flipboard have previously been the products of those publishers participating in its official partner program. These partners include The Guardian, The New York Times and Forbes, to name but a few.

Flipboard 2.0, however, means that users can now create their own magazines rather than just subscribe to those created by established content producers. Other Flipboard users can also subscribe to these magazines, which will display the original sources for their content (thereby driving traffic to publisher sites), as well as comments from social networks.

We use social media to grow your audience by sharing your content with Flipboard users, who then share it with their friends. Flipboard provides a platform for deep content engagement across a growing audience of social influencers and enthusiastic readers. Our readers make over 10 million social recommendations a month via the app to their friends.

The obvious comparison to make here is to Pinterest, the site where people create ‘boards’ of images and videos that other users can then ‘repin’ onto their own boards. Swap boards and repin with ‘magazines’ and ‘flip’ and you have Flipboard 2.0.

Partners vs. users

So, how will people find these magazines? Another feature known as Content Search has been introduced that enables users to search by topic, person or hashtag. There’s certainly an interesting line to be walked between promoting the magazines from paying media partners and surfacing the best grassroot contributions.

“We will surface partners’ content more prominently in search results,” said Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. “But we are trying to find the right balance between curation, and providing the search and other mechanisms to bring in content from other sources.”

Working with publishers

Flipboard wants to offer publishers more than a platform to distribute and curate content; it also wants to help publishers monetise their content.

“If you’re Burberry or Gucci, you’re not going to run a banner ad,” McCue said. “To get brand ad dollars to move to digital, you need to create a beautiful experience.” He believes that Flipboard can build that kind of experience, enabling publishers to better monetise their content by creating a place where brand advertisers can buy beautiful, full-page ads. There is also talk of publishers selling their content direct to consumers through Flipboard, either through subscriptions or even selling individual pieces of content.

Friend or foe?

The new product has been behind a massive increase in the number of people who use the app. Subscribed users are now up to 56 million users with 6 million added in the past month. While many of the features of Flipboard 2.0 will be appealing to publishers, including the promise of content sharing, traffic referrals and now advertising revenue, some commentators are cautioning against jumping into bed with the app too enthusiastically:

The reality the publishing needs to understand…is that Flipboard has (smartly) maneuvered itself into a powerful position. With the flick of a switch, it could deal a serious blow not only to the traditional old media but also to a variety of digital platforms – Tumblr, Flickr, WordPress, among others – as it pivots from purely curation-based interaction to one that offers users full-blown creation abilities. Indeed, this is likely its only future, since without the agreement of the major content creators, Flipboard would be little more than a collection of Tweets and blog posts.

Research and discovery in the life sciences is a pretty complicated business. The complexity of the modern scientific process seems to be a reflection of the intricacies of life and the processes associated with disease and its treatment. Furthermore, as technologies become more advanced, so too does the problem of managing the ever expanding quantity of data being generated.

Currently, pharmaceutical companies expend significant and duplicated efforts aligning and integrating their internal information with public data sources. This process is largely incompatible with large-scale computational approaches and the vast majority of drug discovery sources find it difficult to complicate with eachother.

The typical scientific process produces vast amounts of information that is dispersed and hidden in various data sources (e.g. literature and curated databases). Data-driven life science research, including drug discovery, will increasingly rely on a community of collaborating partners to extract knowledge from these sources to solve complex questions. (1)

Open PHACTS is just such a partnership between academia, publishers, small and medium sized enterprises and pharmaceutical companies. The goal of the project is to deliver and sustain an ‘open pharmacological space’ (OPS) by using and enhancing cutting edge semantic web standards and technologies.  The Open PHACTS Community Workshop, held this week in London, launched the project’s API at dev.openphact.org. Coverage of the event was tweeted under #opslaunch and there’s a lively transcript of the event on Storify.

The Open PHACTS discovery platform delivers a single view across available data resources and is both open access and open source. Scientific text, traditionally difficult to analyse by computer, has factual assertions extracted as semantic triples (the building blocks of semantic technology), allowing for the first time the ability to query textual and database data together to give the answers needed to identify new drug targets and pharmacological interactions.

The project is focused on practical and robust applications to solve specific questions in drug discovery research. OPS is intended to facilitate improvements in drug discovery in academia and industry and to support open innovation and in-house non-public drug discovery research.

Open PHACTS already has a wide community of potential data sources, data consumers, and service providers. However, if you’d like to get involved, there are full details of how to do this on their website.

Here are the current partners:

(1) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359644612001936

This week, Nature Publishing Group announced they had reached 35,000 followers on Pinterest. Given that they had just 127 followers at the end of 2012, this is phenomenal growth. How did they achieve it, I hear you ask? When asked the secret to their success on Twitter, @NatureBlogs replied: “best tip is to continuously update the boards with new images. We make daily (if we can) updates”.  So, given the effort and resource needed to maintain this level of engagement, what can publishers expect in return? Do follower numbers translate into traffic to journal websites?

Over a year ago, I wrote an introductory blog covering the basic mechanics of Pinterest and the impressive growth it had experienced:  it is still the fastest standalone website to surpass the 10 million mark. Now with more than 48 million users, Pinterest is one of the most popular social networks on the web. So, how can publishers get a slice of the action?

Add keywords

Pinterest is a popular site but it’s not nearly as saturated as Google search results. While it’s true that most people prefer to browse Pinterest than search it, there are a significant number who want to discover something that hasn’t already been repinned many times, and search is where they do it.

With every image you post, you should include a clear description that people will enjoy reading. The key seems to be mentioning a keyword that reveals few results in Pinterest but is likely to be searched for often. This can help get the exposure necessary to be repinned and therefore reach more people.

Similarly, you can also take advantage of Pinterest’s popularity to get your Pinterest page into Google. Link to your pinboard from your website, during online promotions and from established social media channels to improve the chances of it showing up in Google search results.

Repin others

In a similar vein to Twitter’s retweets, build awareness of your Pinterest account by repinning others. Use both the search function and categories to find other pins relevant to your boards. When you repin another’s pinned picture, they will receive an email notification. Hopefully, they will follow the links to your account and see where you pinned their picture, giving you an opportunity to have them look through your boards. The obvious need here is to have boards that interest your new visitor to the point that they consider following your links to the site you are promoting.

Comment on pins

When you hold your cursor over a pinned picture you see the “comment” tab, the “repin” tab, and the “like” tab. When you make a comment is stays with the picture, so whatever you say has the potential to catch people’s attention and drive traffic. You might even consider some kind of “call to action” (if it’s appropriate). Again, Pinterest will notify the person who pinned the picture that a comment has been made and give them a link to respond to your comment.

Check your stats

Pinterest introduced a web-based analytics tool in March, allowing site owners to track users’ engagement with their sites on the social network.

The free tool allows site owners to track the number of pinners and pins collecting material from their sites, and the number of repinners and repins those initial pins received. Site owners can also track total impressions and reach on the network, as well as referral traffic, both in clicks and unique visitors, sent back to their sites. This is key in understanding your audience’s likes/dislikes, which will feed into the future selection of content to add.

Publishers with successful Pinterest profiles

• Nature Publishing Group
• Forbes Magazine
• The Guardian
• Time Magazine
• The New York Times
• Wall Street Journal
• BBC

In last week’s blog I looked at the innovative ways that publisher’s are monetising their products in the face of a shifting digital landscape. One of the most ground-breaking moves has come from Forbes Media, who opened up their content creation platform, not only to external authors but also to marketers and brands.

This idea of interweaving promotional content with both editorial and user-generated content (UGC) is central to a much larger concept gaining traction in the online advertising community; native advertising.

• Google Search Ads 
• Promoted Videos on YouTube
• Sponsored Stories on Facebook
• Promoted Tweets on Twitter
• Promoted content on apps (e.g.Pulse and Flipboard)
• Branded playlists on Spotify
• Sponsored check-ins on Foursquare

What ties these seemingly disparate ad products together is one common theme: the ad’s visual design and user experience are native to the site itself, and these native ad placements are filled with quality brand content in the same format as is natural to that site.

As the web matures, advertisers are constantly challenged by how ineffective basic digital advertising techniques are on the new generation of modern web users; the so called ‘digital natives’. Phenomena such as ‘banner blindness’, where users will by default ignore the areas of a web page reserved for advertising, and statistics that show you are more likely to survive a plane crash than click a web banner, demonstrate the need for advertisers to find different ways to reach their audiences effectively.

While rich engagement campaigns that involve video content or mobile apps are good ways of earning attention, native advertising formats offer more nimble, relevant and cost effective ways to reach people in ways that do not disrupt their user experience.

It’s important to remember that native ad executions are not new. For decades brands have been integrated in unique ways into media, such as product placements in TV sponsorships or in Advertising Editorial, or ‘Advertorial’ in print publications. However, it’s only recently that digital advertisers and publishers have started to exploit similar tactics online.

For a visual explanation of the concept, take a look at Solve Media’s infographic.

There were a number of key themes at this year’s Guardian Changing Media Summit — an annual conference which brings together a mixture of CEO and director level executives responsible for commercial, creative and digital strategies.

Most significantly, it was clear that publishers are beginning to see more opportunities than threats from digital technologies and much time was spent discussing the innovative monetisation of digital products.

Newspapers (who now think of themselves as news brands) are certainly learning to cope with disruptive technologies. We are all aware that the digital shift slashed advertising revenue and there was a general feeling that content needed to be open.  However, some publishers, such as The Financial Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post, rebelled. Latest figures show that the New York Times pay wall is finally starting to be profitable. This may explain why 46.7% newspapers now have pay walls and more are following suit (e.g. The Sun, The Telegraph). Pay walls are also showing signs of positively impacting circulation revenue with digital users consuming more news, not less.

Those brave enough to tackle the issue head on by investing in innovation and experimentation are now reaping the benefits. The WELT Group introduced a new subscription model for its digital offerings in December 2012. Its website, DIE WELT, has a metered model based on the The New York Times. Free access is given to users for up to 20 articles per month and users are then required to purchase a subscription from the 21st article. The homepage remains free of charge. Articles which are linked to by search engines, social networks or other pages can also be read for free. DIE WELT also offers a comprehensive brand subscription. All subscribers of a WELT Group newspaper are given unlimited access to the digital offerings, including the website and the apps for smartphones and tablet computers.

Moving away from pay walls and into new digital products, Pearson was the first publisher to release its content in API format to be re-used by other publishers and developers. Since launching Plug & Play in 2011, Pearson’s API data has been free to use by developers, but there is now an agreement that once the usage of that data reaches a certain threshold (what that is depends on the data in question) developers will have to pay a charge to use it. Developers keep all the IP around whatever apps and services they create using the data.

Potentially the most controversial reaction to the changing landscape was that made by Forbes Media. It moved to a self-publishing model in 2010 and recruited 1000 contributors from around the Web, all of whom are offered incentives to build their own audience under the Forbes name. Forbes also gave the same incentives to marketers and encouraged them to create their own content, which is hosted on the same WordPress platform. A data dashboard is publicly visible at the side of each article and updates in real time, thereby instilling a constant sense of competition amongst authors. Forbes has therefore become a platform for content creation rather than a news website. Taking down the walls between editorial and marketing has not been without criticism. However, looking purely at figures, this change has been highly successful -  usage increased from 12 million to 26 million unique users according to comScore.

However, Lewis D’Vorkin, Chief Product Officer at Forbes Media, made it clear that publishers need to make sure that they can provide enough content efficiently to warrant expansion to different platforms – “don’t focus on the bright shiny things that other people are looking at and try emulate if you don’t have the content”. This is why Forbes has opened up content creation to the masses and then adds value by curating it. Whether or not this is the best response to the digital challenge is debatable, but what is clear is that those that aren’t experimenting will not survive.

As you may already be aware, Facebook is rolling out the first major update to its News Feed since the feature launched nearly seven years ago. As with every other change the site has made, the new design has been met with mixed reactions and hasn’t gone unnoticed by the media.

Facebook’s revamped News Feed gives the homepage a starkly mobile look, reducing clutter and lending more space to prominent photographs. It takes significant cues from the Facebook mobile apps for phones and tablets, adding a new side navigation bar and more white space.

• More prominent images

The new look is a drastic departure from the Facebook of old, which many users complained had become too cluttered. The focus on stories within the feed is now far more visual. Greater emphasis is given to images, which are now much bigger. Photos now make up nearly 50% of news feed stories and are front and centre.

Facebook says it is following trends on where design is headed and that trend seems to include big photos and a clean, navigable design. This can also be seen on other social sites (Instagram, Pinterest,  RebelMouse) and even academic journals such as eLife and PeerJ.

• Greater control of feeds

As for the ‘feeds’ aspect of the News Feed, users now have access to more types of feed and greater control over how those feeds are displayed. Users can subscribe to different types of feed, including feeds from all friends, close friends, music, photos, games and those who a user ‘follows’.

• Mobile consistency across platforms

The new design was undoubtedly inspired by mobile. Understanding that more users are accessing Facebook from mobile, Facebook is focused on making the overall experience consistent across all platforms. It borrows features from Facebook’s iPad, iPhone and Android apps, such as a left-hand navigation bar that may be unfamiliar to non-mobile users.

What does this mean for brands?

Another notable difference is the prominence given to advertising on the News Feed; a feature welcomed by marketers but loathed by some users.

Many see it as an intrusion into their ‘social stream’ when they find unsolicited updates from brands alongside posts shared by friends. The new design means that sponsored News Feed updates from companies may take up a sizable chunk of the screen, sometimes over a third of the homepage.

Brands and marketers will view the redesign differently, of course. One distinct advantage for them is that Facebook have made it more difficult for users to ‘unlike’ pages directly from their News Feed. Users can still hide posts from pages they have ‘liked’, but to properly ‘unlike’ a page they will have to follow a complicated process of hovering over links, or actually visit the page and click ‘unlike’. This will allow companies to better retain their fan counts, even when users decide to hide posts from their News Feeds. It will mean, however, that ‘like’ numbers will become a less accurate measure of a brand’s engagement with its users.

If you’re looking to connect with people in a particular niche on Twitter, Followerwonk could be just the tool for you. It’s currently free to search Twitter biographies, compare users and analyse followers of multiple accounts, so try it out before subscriptions kick in.

What can I find out about my followers?

By linking a Twitter account to Followerwonk, users can run a number of different analytic reports for free. Below is a list of the most useful for strategically growing a following and connecting with ‘influencers’ in a specific area:

• Influence scores – how influential are your followers?
• Follower counts – how many followers do your followers have?
• Mapped locations – where are your followers located? (see below)

• Account ages – how long have your followers been on Twitter?
• Recencies of tweets – are your followers dormant or active?
• Bio word cloud – what do your followers tweet about? Are you reaching the right people?
• Retweets – what percentage of your followers’ tweets are made up of retweets? How likely are they to retweet your content?
• Tweet times – when are your followers tweeting? (see below)

What can I find out about my competitors?

If you run several Twitter accounts and are wondering how many of your followers overlap and follow multiple accounts, you can run a free comparison of up to three different accounts. The results are displayed in a handy venn diagram, as below. As well as comparing your own accounts, you can also compare competitor accounts. For example, below I have compared followers of @bmj_latest and @TheLancet. There is a good deal of overlap between the two, with 22, 285 people following both accounts. However, there are almost double that number following each of the accounts individually. This provides a very targetted list of potential followers that can be approached by either account.

Search engine

FollowerWonk can also act as a search engine for Twitter profiles. If you’re an academic publisher looking to connect with students in a particular area, you might type in “history students” into Followerwonk’s search box. You can also include additional parameters, such as location, minimum number of followers and/or number of tweets. Search results are then sorted by ‘social influence’, so that you can easily target influencers in a particular niche.

If you’re looking for new people to follow on Twitter, or simply want to analyse who’s following you, I’d recommend having a look at Followerwonk while it’s still free.

For more information on how the tool can be employed, take a look at the video below: