We often think of social media as a powder keg. Facebook and Twitter have the potential to provide an instantaneous sounding board for disconnected people due to their wide range and immediate feedback; creating sudden consequences for anyone who stands out from the crowd.
Whether you're a Twitter user like Lady Gaga (over 7.5 million followers) or, say, me (only 135 followers), you're always aware of roughly how many people follow you. It’s just how people keep score on the site and compare themselves with friends and colleagues.
But it turns out that counting followers is a seriously flawed way to measure a person’s impact on Twitter. Even one of Twitter’s founders, Evan Williams, made the point recently: someone with millions of followers may no longer post messages frequently, while someone followed by mere tens of thousands may be a prolific poster whose messages are amplified by others.
So who are the most influential people on Twitter?
The people at Twitalyzer, an independent research firm, studied the question, and came up with something called the Influence Index. It counts the number of times somebody’s Twitter name is mentioned by other users (including retweets, which occur when one user rebroadcasts another’s message). The Influence Index doesn’t merely measure who’s talking on Twitter, but it also measures how much someone is affecting the conversation. Look at how low Lady Gaga’s influence score is at 41.
In politics, Newt Gingrich's influence score is 13 with over 1.3 million followers whereas Sarah Palin's influence score is 39 with 401,505 followers.
Among the discoveries: It helps to come from one of the four countries where Twitter is most popular — the United States, Brazil, England and Canada. Among the top ten influencers are: Conan O'Brien (2.367 million followers - Influence Index: 88), Snoop Dogg (2.5 million followers - Influence Index: 85) and Barack Obama (6.5 million followers - Influence Index: 83).
Eric T. Peterson, the chief executive of Twitalyzer, points out that some of the most influential users also make a big effort to respond to much less famous people with personal messages. Kim Kardashian falls into this category. President Obama, as you may have guessed, does not.
Source: The New York Times, March 27, 2011