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Twitter Followers vs. Influence

March 30th, 2010 Posted in Building Community

File this under: “Concepts we know, but are glad to have data and research to back it up”….

A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be “popular” Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don’t always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 9:05 am and is filed under Building Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • TiaFisher

    Thanks for this Jake. I use three useful Twitter tools: twitcleaner (shows you how valuable the people you follow are are and lets you unfollow en masse: twitter karma (who isn't following you back and when did they last tweet etc) and twitter klout, which measures the standing of a Twitter name based on the 'power' of followers and who you follow, not the number of same. Happily, we are both 'persona's in Klout Jake! :-)

  • http://www.emoderation.com/ Tia Fisher

    Thanks for this Jake. I use three useful Twitter tools: twitcleaner (shows you how valuable the people you follow are are and lets you unfollow en masse: twitter karma (who isn't following you back and when did they last tweet etc) and twitter klout, which measures the standing of a Twitter name based on the 'power' of followers and who you follow, not the number of same. Happily, we are both 'persona's in Klout Jake! :-)