Even though a Twitter user may have a large following, his or her influence on Twitter is more strongly associated with engagement rather than numbers of followers or retweets, according to new research from the Hewlett-Packard Social Computing Lab.
Because most Twitter users are passive, influence on Twitter is linked to a Twitter user's ability to motivate followers to retweet and click URLs; accordingly, the research measures "Influence-Passivity" (IP).
That metric calculates user influence based on how far a tweet travels on Twitter, taking into account the levels of passivity that those tweets encounter along the way.
IP-Influence doesn't neatly correlate with popularity. For example, among the users with the most IP-Influence is Indonesian filmmaker Joko Anwar—who ranks nearly evenly with Google in IP-influence but has a much smaller number of Twitter followers.
Below, Twitter's 10 most influential accounts, ranked by IP-Influence, with Twitter follower data as of August 9, 2010:
- @mashable: Pete Cashmore, social media blogger (2,043,680 followers)
- @jokoanwar: Joko Anwar, film director (60,440 followers)
- @google: Google News (2,362,219 followers)
- @aplusk: Ashton Kutcher, actor (5,436,442 followers)
- @syfy: Craig Engler, science fiction channel (40,995)
- @smashingmag: Vitaly Friedman, online developer magazine (228,494 followers)
- @michellemalkin: Michelle Malkin, conservative commentator (94,113 followers)
- @theonion: The Onion, news satire organization (2,306,574 followers)
- @rww: Richard MacManus, tech/social media blogger (1,038,528 followers)
- @breakingnews: Breaking News, news aggregator (1,804,192 followers)
