I just caught news of this report by Alex Leavitt, Evan Burchard, David Fowler and Sam Gilbert via Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) on Twitter.

Recently the researches involved with the report, using a new methodology, examined 134,000 tweets, 15,866,629 followers and 899,733 followees, and in response to the 2,143 tweets generated by 12 specific users on Twitter over a ten-day period. They also collected 90,130 responses published by other users.

The summary of their findings are:

• mashable is more influential than CNN.
• sockington is more influential than MCHammer, while MCHammer is more influential than three major social media analysts (garyvee, Scobleizer, andchrisbrogan).
• Celebrities with higher follower totals (eg., THE_REAL_SHAQ and ijustine) foster more conversation than provide retweetable content.
• News outlets, regardless of follower count, influence large amounts of followers to republish their content to other users

You can download the complete report in PDF format here

A couple of the key factors of the report that I found rather interesting are

- Many of the popularized studies examining influence on Twitter fail to identify the nuances of social interaction in the system. While attempts have been made (eg., , the analyses tend to focus on the connections between users rather than the relationship of users, content, and platform.

- A focus solely on the connections between users skews an understanding of how influence operates and flows on Twitter.

All in all an interesting report to read if you are a Twitter analyst.

Mashable has more influence than CNN on Twitter is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter is without any doubt the current darling of the Internet with number of users sitting at around the 6 million mark and growing. The numbers of course depend on who you listen to but that doesn’t change the fact that it looks like Twitter is here to stay. As with all services there will always be people who will love nothing better than to slice and dice any kind of data sets that can be derived from analyzing usage and traffic.

In the case of Twitter there is a big interest from PR companies such as Waggener Edstrom who monitors Twitter on behalf of its various client, but especially Microsoft. As result of this targeted need the folks at Waggener Edstrom have developed a piece of software called twendz which they use to monitor and analyze the Twittersphere.

What makes this really interesting though is that they are making the same tool they use available to everyone for free. The idea behind twendz as told to Mary Jo Foley by a company spokesperson

“Twendz marries twitter search with real-time sentiment analysis. twendz is able to effectively generalize the attitudes and feelings about a particular topic, product or brand as the conversation happens. So, for example, the latest top trend on twitter is about the new iPod Shuffle. twendz is able to tell you how people are feeling about the new iPod, and it can summarize those feelings and attitudes for you over time.”

Source: Mary Jo Foley – ZDNet

Now this could be kind of interesting to play around with .. definitely something to bookmark.

You to can be a Twitter trends analyst is a post from: The Inquisitr