Social Media Week 2012: The Influence Leaderboard

The Twitter Influence Leaderboard is back! This year we’re tracking #smwldn and other key hashtags such as #SB100 and #leveson. We’ve also included a ‘hashtags’ tab which will display the most frequently occurring additional tags in tweets that we’re tracking, enabling us to look into related topics and events.

This builds from last year when we set up a simple twitter leaderboard tool which showed the top tweets and top influencers on the #smwldn hashtag. If you followed us last year, you’ll remember it caused plenty of debate on the meaning of influence.

A great example was when Radio 1’s Scott Mills managed to storm up the leaderboard, overtaking Sophie Brendel, Head of Digital Engagement at BBC, as a more ‘influential’ person on the #smwldn hashtag.

Although Scott Mills is very ‘influential’ in the UK at large, he’s not a social media expert  like Sophie, and hadn’t been tweeting on the #smwldn hashtag before his event. By announcing a twitter-powered race live on air, Scott managed to gain a huge number of twitter followers in a short time,  power a car around a scalextrix track, and overtake Sophie – outlining the importance of context when calculating influence.

Inspired by Joanne Jacobs’ comments on the SMW2011 Leaderboard about the “echo chamber of love” that exists in the social media world, we wanted to dig a little deeper this year. So, taking the influence debate further, we’ll also be carrying out an exercise after Social Media Week 2012 analysing the flow of content between our influencers during the week. We’ll take the top 20 influencers from our leaderboard, and look at who is linking to who:

This uses our twitter influence mapping tool, which shows both the influence and connectedness of any community.  The example above shows mummy bloggers. The bar height represents followers, bar colour denotes sub-topic, and the linking lines are directional, blue to pink. So the most influential people, whose content is shared most among the influencer network, are the pinkest nodes.

In 2011, professional tweeter @lesanto dominated the leaderboard through sheer volume of tweets throughout the week, reporting live at @wearelikeminds events (to the point where Twitter thought he may not be human!),  but will he be the most influential this year, when we analyse the network?

Where are the influencers getting their content from?  Watch this space for the truth behind the UK social media community and remember we can include more hashtags throughout the week so leave a comment if there are any relevant ones you’d like us to include!

Update: check out the results of our influence leaderboard tool!