In 2009, Ashton Kutcher set out to be the first in the twitterverse to obtain one million followers. These days it’s not uncommon for celebrities and popular brands to hit one million. In fact, many have soared beyond two, three, and even four million followers.
Brands like Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and WholeFoods have all passed the one million mark. Oprah snagged a million in just 28 days, and currently shares tweets with over three million people. Martha Stewart is pushing her following towards two million by offering prizes through a follower sweepstakes. But is there power in numbers? After all, you can never have too many followers, right?
Social media expert Chris Brogan—a man with quite a few followers himself—knows that numbers don’t always indicate influence. “Never ever ever look at my numbers first. Never. Never look at anyone’s numbers first,” says Brogan. “Decide whether the community responds and interacts and then determine if you’ve got an influencer.”
Across the web there’s countless stories of small, loyal fan groups outperforming the masses. Take for example the woman behind the “Oprah Effect,” who garnered more response from her blog’s 1,000 passionate followers than a well-known technology blog with nearly two million readers.
The idea that numbers aren’t tied directly to influence has long been suspected by social media users, and now a new study, “Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy,” has offered proof that quantity doesn’t always equal quality.
With Twitter’s consent a group of researchers scanned over six million active twitter accounts, compiling information on three primary measures of influence: followers, retweets and mentions. The most followed were—no surprise—news sources and celebrity accounts. The most retweeted users were generally content aggregators like TweetMeme or TwitterTips. As for those with the most mentions, celebrities again topped the list.
Though this information is less than ground breaking, the final factor researchers examined, overall influence, turned up some unexpected results.
The group compiled a list of the top 100 influencers in each category. The resulting 300 “all-time influencials” included celebrities, news organizations, and powerful brands, but it also included regular people—users like you and me.
Additionally, the researchers found that very little overlap existed among the three groups. In fact, only 7.1% of top users led in followers, mentions, and retweets. In other words, although those with many followers are more likely to be mentioned and retweeted, a user’s following alone does not necessarily indicate influence.
