What’s your Twitter influencer rating?

I was fortunate enough to have attended a panel discussion recently where Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring, sat on the panel. During the discussion, he mentioned an experiment that he did to see how many of his Twitter followers clicked on links that he posted in his updates.

I repeated this experiment by tracking a bit.ly link that I created and posted to my Twitter updates.  Within 3 minutes I logged 6 clicks to the link.  After 30 minutes there were no further clicks.

One thing that we can calculate is click-to-follower ratio:

hoomanradfar: 40/890 = .045

dnewcome: 6/68 = .088

In Hooman’s experiment, he also posted the link to Facebook.  I’m not including his Facebook friends here.  This should weight things a little in his favor, but I’m also not handicapping the results by assuming that only 10% of the audience saw the link at all.

How do we interpret these results?

Is this a measure of your power as an influencer, or is the variability of the follower population too much of a confounding factor to make such a conclusion?  Is it likely that this will scale?  If I had as many followers as Hooman, would I have been able to muster 80 clicks?  Is there a better metric than click-to-follower ratio that we can use?