First of all the inspiration from this is from distilled, specifically the presentation from Paddy and a previous post from Tom.

So lets talk first about the end results of what you’ll get from this:

• List of twitter followers
• Website address of twitter followers
• Website PR rank of twitter followers
• Alexa rank of twitter followers

Obviously with this info you can then build some targets of relevant sites & have an easy way of getting in touch via twitter DM.   It could probably be adapted to include the email addresses from the domain whois, but that’s one for another time.

It’s also worth mentioning that you could also do this to check other twitter users accounts – so if you are trying to build your own twitter profile then it may also come in handy..

Before you start: This can save you a lot of time and effort but it’s not perfect.  Google have a limit of 50 XML Imports per sheet so you’ll need to do a lot of copying and pasting if you have a lot of followers.

1. Get your follower details

The first thing that you need to do is export a list of your followers to CSV – you can’t do this on the official twitter site so you’ll need to head on over to Friend of Follow instead.

Pop in your twitter username and once it loads go to the “Fans” tab.  Now Export to a CSV.

2. Upload CSV into Google Docs

Log into Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) and select Upload.  Once all done open it up within Google Docs – you may need to add some more columns (click on far right column then select Insert / Columns Right).

3. Scraping the Web URL

Now the fun part starts.   Friend of Follow gives you some good info but it doesn’t give you the twitter users web address, to do this you are going to have to use a feature in Google called ImportXML to scrape it.    You could scrape this from twitter but in this case we’ll use Qwerty as it doesn’t force you to login.

Have a quick look at your profile within Qwerly and you will see that under the Profile info (example http://qwerly.com/twitter/3wdl) it has the website address.

So now back to the Google Doc.    The first thing that we’re going to do is create a column with the users qwerly URL.  This is simple and the formula you will need is something like this:

=”http://qwerly.com/twitter/”& A2

Next we’re going to do the actual scraping – this uses Google’s ImportXML function and again, you can refer to the distilled blog post here or Google’s own very limited documentation on it here.  Distilled also give ref to SEO Gadget so it’s own fair we pop in their link too.

So if you have a look at the Qwerly site you can view the source code on how they display the web URL, here is an example:

<h2>
<strong>Web</strong> <span><a href=”http://lovemonkeysblog.blogspot.com” rel=”me”>http://lovemonkeysblog.blogspot.com</a></span>
</h2>

So the formula that you’ll need for qwerly is:

=importxml(K2,”//h2[@class='website']//a”)

This is telling you to look at cell K2 (which is where we placed the Qwerly URL), then look at the h2 headings for a class called website.  Within website we just want the link (which is what the a is for).

So now we have a list of your twitter followers and their web addresses.   This is nice, but I want more.

4. Adding in Google Page Rank

You could probably scrape Google / another site to find the page rank, but in this case it’s actually 100x similar.  All you need to do is add a script into the Googledoc, to do this:

1. Go to Insert
2. Select Script
3. Search for Google Page Rank
4. Click Install
5. Select Authorize

Now go back to your Google doc and enter the following formula

=pageRank(L2)

Now you will see that the Pagerank should now be populated.

But why stop there?   Alexa ranking isn’t the best thing in the world, but I do still use it as a good guide over traffic to sites, especially as it’s free.

5. Adding in Alexa Details

Kudos to Stephen Fosktt for this one.   I played about with Alexa scraping for ages and was tearing my hair out because of their pretty awful source code before seeing Stephen’s blog and seeing that I could scrape it quite easily from the search results.

The formula for Alexa is:

=value(importXML(“http://www.alexa.com/search?q=”&L2,”//ul[@class='traffic-stats']/li/a[@href][1]“))

Now your sheet has some really useful info – you can sort by how popular there are on twitter, their PR rank, etc.    As stated earlier, the big problem that you have is the frustrating limit that Google put on the number of XMLImports that you can do.   The sheet could be expanded to include other info on the web about these sites but this has been enough for me for now.

You can view the completed version to use as an example here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvoNoE_CqGaBdGFFSmRDbXlKMGtyN3NjU2hKdVRWV0E&hl=en

Make sure you check the other resources used, namely:

http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/
http://seogadget.co.uk/playing-around-with-importxml-in-google-spreadsheets/ and
http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/07/02/cool-google-spreadsheet-importxml-xpath/

Enjoy!