The Top 20 MRX Tweeters: RESEARCHED!
I couldn’t resist doing a bit of number crunching on these candidates.
Location: 13 are from North America (10 USA, 3 Canada), 5 from Europe, 2 from Australia. Africa, Asia, LatAm not represented.
Demographics: 12 men, 8 women. All - as far as I can tell from profile pics - are white. (I am aware that one of the profile pics is a sock monster but I have inside information as to the ethnicity of this researcher).
Self-presentation: Everyone opts for a picture of themselves. 19 out of 20 use a head or head-and-shoulder shot - @VirtualMR is the only one of these who goes so far as showing an arm. The remaining 1 out of 20 uses a picture of their hand concealed under a sock beast. 13 out of 20 mention their employer in their bio; 16 out of 20 use a Twitter name which relates to their real name (the other 4 relate it to their profession). 10 out of 20 are wearing specs.
Twitter usage: Here’s where things get more intriguing. Between them the 20 nominees have sent 106,000 tweets. The 5 most prolific account for half of these. The heaviest user in the group is @LoveStats - 13,700 tweets sent. The least prolific is @rstrohmenger (just under 700 tweets).
Followers and follows: @TomHCAnderson dominates both of these. With over 50,000 followers he has more than the other 19 nominees put together. Only two others - @lovestats and @virtualMR - get more than 5,000. So it’s lucky Twitter isn’t a popularity contest. Tom is also following 20,000 people - more than 15,000 more than anyone else. The correlation between number of followers and follows across the list is 0.98, by the way, suggesting a certain amount of tit-for-tat remains in the #mrx attention economy.
Lists: Cathy Harrison - @VirtualMR - is the most listed of the nominees, appearing on more than 800 of the things.
Those are Twitter’s topline stats, but you can juggle them to produce a couple of other interesting ones without needing to dig into the actual content.
Follower:Follow Ratio: This can be interpreted in lots of ways - it’s basically a measure of how unlikely someone is to follow you back (celebrities have a colossal FF ratio). A high FF ratio may imply usefulness of content, a low one may imply generosity - to be honest nothing in this game is a ‘rule’. Anyway, the highest FF ratio goes to Forrester’s @rreitsma, who follows around 1 in 7 of the people who follow her. @LongoMR and @1sue3, at the other end of the scale, follow more people than follow them.
Followers/Tweet: Another ambiguous metric - this might imply high signal: each tweet this person sends attracts followers. Or it might imply an ability to game the system by acquiring junk followers. Or it might imply a celebrity who is popular offline but hardly uses Twitter. We can rule that one out, I guess. This is another one where - inevitably - @TomHCAnderson dominates, his every tweet netting him 6 new followers.
And the conclusion? That there are a lot of ways to use Twitter and the list showcases most of them. Any of the people listed would be a worthy and deserved winner. If it’s simply a numbers game, though, bookies should be cutting the odds on Mr Anderson sharpish.
