While many celebrities might have millions of people following their lives on the web, the most influential Tweeters are actually less known “experts”, according to new research. Researchers at Northwestern University in the US have used new technology to sift through the tens of millions of tweets sent each day on the micro-blogging website to […]
While many celebrities might have millions of people following their lives on the web, the most influential Tweeters are actually less known “experts”, according to new research. Researchers at Northwestern University in the US have used new technology to sift through the tens of millions of tweets sent each day on the micro-blogging website to pinpoint the most influential people on the hot topic of the day.
Popular celebrities who are part of the Twitterati include Ashton Kutcher, the actor, his wife, Demi Moore, the actress, Justin Bieber, the teenage pop star, Lady Gaga, the controversial singer, and Stephen Fry, the broadcaster. However, the scientists concluded that most “influential” users on Twitter were actually people with much lower profiles but who were experts in their own fields rather than celebrities with the most followers.
02/10/2010
“People think that just because you have a huge number of followers you may potentially be an influencer, and that is not the case,” said Professor Alok Choudhary, who led the research.
“A lot of people think that just because you tweet a lot means you may have influence or you are important. But there are a lot of junk tweets.
“Our premise is that influencers are those that dynamically change the opinions of people on specific topics, or the topic of the moment.
He added: “If someone from BP is tweeting about the oil spill, for example, his opinions are likely to carry much more weight and be of much greater interest than those of Ashton Kutcher, who has a legion of followers.”
Using massive amount of texts, network analysis and real-time response measures Prof Choudhary and his team have developed a website to rank the most influential tweeters on a topic.
“So, which tweets should you read? Which tweets are being read by media experts on any given subject, such as politics, law, fashion, food? We provide that information,” he added.
Although Twitter, which limits tweets to 140 characters, is only four years old it has become an immensely popular social networking website with 145 million users and an average of 90 million tweets per day.
