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 , and chrisbrogan ).
- 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.
