At the start of the whole social media explosion especially on Facebook and Twitter people liked to boast about the number of friends or followers they had. Although it sounded impressive it quickly lost its appeal as people realized that numbers are not that relevant especially from the Marketer’s point of view. The focus quickly switched more to the influence of these numbers of follower / friends. Like they say it’s not about the quantity but more about the quality.

A new study recently released from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany looked specifically at data from about 52 million Twitter accounts and some interesting findings were made:

• Being in the top 10% in terms of followers isn’t strongly correlated with being in the top 10% in terms of re-tweets or mentions. Re-tweets and mentions, however, are highly correlated with each other.
• The study identified only 6 million accounts with at least 10 Tweets since their creation.
• Influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort.

Although there are many theories about how influence should be measured researcher Meeyoung Cha that worked on this paper commented in an article on Harvard Business Review:

“Now a very interesting question would be, “How should one measure influence?” We are afraid that there are no easy answers here. One would have to take a combination of many metrics, including follower count, mentions, and re-tweets. However the hard part is figuring out the relative importance of the component metrics. This is the subject of our future research. “

This is an interesting debate to keep an eye on as more research and statistics on this topic becomes available.