The most influential Twitter feeds don’t necessarily have the most followers. That’s the insight given by a new technique for ranking twitterers, which has been used to create a chart of the top 100 news-media Twitter feeds.

The new system is different from conventional web page rankings, which rely on the PageRank algorithm developed by Larry Page at Google. This judges that a page is important if other important pages link to it, so a website’s rank mostly comes from analysis of the pattern of links to and from other websites.

A similar approach has been tried for ranking Twitter feeds, but with limited success. This is because PageRank doesn’t look at “retweeting” – forwarding a tweet to other users, which is an important measure of a tweet’s importance. “That’s an active process that the structure of links in the network does not capture,” says Daniel Romero at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who together with colleagues has come up with a better way to rank Twitter feeds.

Tweeters and followers

Romero and colleagues use two different factors to determine how influential twitterers are: the total number of people who follow them, and how likely these followers are to retweet their messages. The team describes this second measure as a follower’s “passivity”.


Some users routinely retweet many messages, however, most followers are passive and rarely or never retweet.

In the new approach, the most influential tweets are those that change this status quo, persuading followers who rarely retweet to forward the message. That ability to change the behaviour of passive followers is the crucial factor that defines influential Twitter feeds, says Wojciech Galuba of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, a co-author of the study. “Our algorithm measures this ability to change people’s behaviour.”

The new method of ranking throws up some surprises. For example, the team found that the most popular twitterers are not necessarily the most influential. Popular feeds may reach many followers, but if tweets are rarely passed on they do not spread. The most influential Twitter feeds, on the other hand, are the ones with followers who retweet the messages and persuade passive followers to become active.

Hot news

Last week, Romero released a list of the top 100 most influential news-media Twitter feeds. Top of the list is @mashable, from the social-media news blog Mashable, followed by @cnnbrk, breaking news from the CNN network. However, the team were surprised to find @big_picture at number 3, a feed with only 23,000 followers (compared with over 3 million for @cnnbrk).

@big_picture provides links to top-quality photojournalism selected by The Boston Globe newspaper. “@big_picture proves that a large number of followers is not necessary to be influential,” says Romero. The full list is here: @newscientist is ranked at 28.

Galuba is currently building a website that will allow people to analyse the influence of their feeds and how it is changing in real time.

As well as ranking Twitter feeds, the technique allows the team to rank individual tweets themselves by measuring how far they have spread through the network. “So we can show them tweets ranked by influence rather than chronology,” says Galuba. He says the new site should be live within the next two or three months.

Romero conducted the work in the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California.