Number of Twitter Followers Not a Sign of Influence

According to a recent study Measuring the Influence of Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy, there are three main measures of influence in Twitter.

1. Indegree influence, the number of followers of a user, directly indicates the size of the audience for that user.

2. Retweet influence, which we measure through the number of retweets containing one’s name, indicates the ability of that user to generate content with pass-along value.

3. Mention influence, which we measure through the number of mentions containing one’s name, indicates the ability of that user to engage others in a conversation

And, it turns out, the number of followers a person has in Twitter (called indegree influence) is not a measure of influence.

The number of followers of a Tweeter is largely meaningless…. “Popular users who have a high indegree [number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions,”

So having a lot of followers doesn’t really mean one has a high degree of influence via Twitter.

Here are some highlights from the abstract of the article:

First, popular users who have high indegree are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions. Second, most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics. Third, influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic. We believe that these findings provide new insights for viral marketing and suggest that topological measures such as indegree alone reveals very little about the influence of a user.

So rather than trying to get as many followers as possible in Twitter or Yammer or some other messaging program, instead, keep your messages focused and on target and you’ll have greater influence in terms of others passing on your messages or mentioning your content.