[Guest Blog] Measuring Twitter Influence at Social Media Week London

This is a Guest Blog by Ally Manock of Brass Agency, who are hosting “Down on the Farm with Brass Agency and Ribena” on Fri 11th, 10am – 11.15am.

‘Influence’ in social media terms was discussed a great deal in 2010 and seems set to be debated further in 2011. The fact that Social Media Week’s Influence Panel Debate was the first to sell out shows what a popular topic it still is!

How we calculated ‘influence’ for Social Media Week With all of the above still in mind, we thought that the upcoming Social Media Week in London gave us an ideal opportunity to have a little bit of fun and see if we could have a go at tracking the influence of people tweeting with the hashtag #SMWLDN.

We developed a ‘Social Media Week Twitter Influence Leaderboard’ which tracks, in real time, the most talked about subjects, people and events of the week.

We’re very open about our thought process and how we have calculated influence; we don’t claim to have answered the influence ‘question’ and this isn’t another Klout or Peer Index.

We’d like this to be a bit of fun for everyone. We know there are some competitive social media peeps out there who will try and tweet their way to the top and we’d like the Social Media Week Twitter Influence Leaderboard to add to the discussion around influence.

Find out how we calculated influence for Social Media Week, or go straight to the Social Media Week Twitter Influence Leaderboard

What do you think is the true measure of influence on Twitter? We’re looking forward to the panel debate around influence at Social Media Week on Thursday 10th February.

Azeem Azhar, CEO and Founder of Peer Index is on the panel and we’re expecting some lively discussion! It will be interesting to see if the tweets coming out of that session affect our leaderboard significantly.

As we said, we’d like this leaderboard to add to the debate about influence.  What do you think defines ‘influence’? Does our leaderboard show some useful data, or are we missing something significant?