With eMarketer predicting US Twitter monthly usage hitting 18MM in 2009, it’s worth looking at who wields the most influence on Twitter. Is it the users with the most followers? The users with the greatest follower-to-followee ratio? The Celebrities? The Digerati? The Newsers?
The folks at Web Ecology Project think they have found the answer. In their recent report titled “The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter”, they conclude that Newsers and Celebrities are the most influential groups on Twitter.
Choosing to look beyond sheer numbers of followers as a signifier of influence, WEP examined an ecosystem of 134,654 tweets, 90,130 responses, 15,866,629 followers, and 899,773 followees over a 10-day period and focused on the relationships and interactions between Materialistic (those who collect followers to push content) and Conversationalist (those who collect followers to focus on personal conversations) influencers and others.
Web Ecology Project defines influence as the potential of an action of a user to initiate further action by another user. By looking at the four markers of influence (@ reply, RT retweet, @ mention, & “via” attribution) and weighing for numbers of followers and the relative amount of content produced, WEP concludes that Newsers @cnnbrk and @mashable and Celebrities @the_real_shaq and @aplusk are the top Twitter influencers. I highly recommend you download the entire report to best understand how they arrived at these conclusions.
WEP’s approach and methodolgy are innovative but ultimately limiting. I want more than just the obvious big names. In an age of no center, where very few — some would argue zero — wield mass influence, this list is the tip of the influencer iceberg. Using WEP’s methodology, the real interest will be in revealing the influencers in a multitude of communities.
Forget Ashton Kutcher and CNN — they play to the mythical center. I’m more interested in the margins, the niches. The sports influencers. The youth influencers. The business influencers. The mommy influencers. The tech influencers. The meat-and-potatoes influencers of every community imaginable. Those are the real influencers. And that’s who I and many other marketers want find out about.
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The next wave of innovative thinking around processes and technology will be around the digital influencers. To follow up in the point you make about the methodology, it seems that WEP looked at the top influencers in pop culture by the number of followers rather than the actual influence a user carries.
For instance, a B2B marketer with less than 500 followers might not appear in this list at all, but his opinion might carry a lot of influence among the top decision makers in his/her industry, thus translating that into potentially high revenue for the brands he or she is recommending.
The definition of influence is spot on: “Web Ecology Project defines influence as the potential of an action of a user to initiate further action by another user.” In the digital world that is *currently* the measure of influence.
But what if you take that further. What if rather than driving someone to RT you drive them to actively endorse the brand.
That is the connection between brands and influencers that is missing and what should be at the center of 2010 innovation.