It's Not the Tweet, It's the Thought
To be a Twitter Influencer Requires True ExpertiseWould it surprise you to learn that celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey are not the most influential people on Twitter, despite their having millions of followers?
"People think that just because you have a massive followership, or if you tweet often, you may potentially be an influencer, and that is not the case," says Alok Choudhary, the chair of the electrical engineering and computer science department at Northwestern University. "Who influences is very topic driven and based on real-time dynamic responses."
To be an influencer on Twitter, according to researchers at Northwestern University, individuals must pursue deep interaction on a specific topic and engagement with people.
In other words, it isn't who knows you that counts, but rather what you know.
For the uninitiated, Twitter is the social networking and micro blogging service, that enables its users to send and read other users' 140-character messages, which are called tweets.
Choudhary, along with a graduate student at Northwestern, developed a website, www.pulseofthetweeters.com, to mine millions of tweets, then find and rank the most influential users on Twitter. The researchers use data mining tools, sentiment analysis, and network analysis algorithms to determine who is most influential.
Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey do not make their list. But interestingly, on the topic of 'Oprah' Nancy 0'Dell, author and co-anchor of 'Access Hollywood' rank high. Again, on the topic of "Bin Laden," for instance, the top influencers are BBC World and NPR News.
"Influencers are those that dynamically change the opinions and thoughts of people on specific topics in real time," says Choudary.
So what does influence mean here? Does it mean persuasion or being a thought leader in our area of expertise?
I will go with the latter, as the main point here is engagement and being responsive to bring about a difference, a change in the way they think about a particular topic.
This brings me to think about how I use Twitter. I basically use this social media site to bring attention to the content my colleagues and I create for people who may be interested in reading about information security related news.
But perhaps I am taking the wrong route. If I and others want to be influencers, maybe we have to think beyond just tweeting and creating a followership. We need to move from a passive state-of-mind to becoming active in knowing who our followers are? What kind of topics are of interest to them? What sentiments and opinions do they hold on targeted topics? What makes them laugh? Then we need to engage them in real-time discussions.
The key to understand here is that there is no thought leadership - until we create that magic connection with people.
What are your thoughts on the topic? Share with me. Let's be influencers.