What do you do when you want to know what the best new phone is? Or, for that matter, the best laptops, the best car, washing machine, or helicopter? How do you get your information?
Chances are, you look for information on the internet. But how can you be sure which sources are accurate and trustworthy? One answer can be found within the depths of social media. Specifically, it can be found within Twitter, the platform that allows information to circulate most quickly to the various corners of the internet. This means that whether you like it or not, an opinion originating somewhere on Twitter is more likely than not to be a major influence on your own opinion if you’re shopping or researching online. But influence is a tricky thing to measure. Some Twitter feeds are more popular than others, but this doesn’t give us an exact idea of the power they exert over discourse and decision-making. Fortunately for you, technology has come to the rescue, and we can present you with this infographic of the ten most influential technology-based Twitter feeds in the UK. How about that?
We’ve limited the scope of our investigation to technology for the moment because technology is the thing people are most likely to hunt for opinions on online. The “influence scores” you see on the graphic were calculated by Mavens of London by using information from Twitter and Google to get a good idea of who was who in the technological parts of the Twittersphere. Once these sites were amassed, they were analysed based on popularity (to eliminate the smaller ones), and then calibrated based on multiple topics, including their use of certain keywords, the number of tweets per day, and the frequency with which they showed up in Google and Twitter searches. We also factored in the number of days each feed was active, and the amount of times viewers followed any links provided by each feed.
Scores were then mapped according to their standard deviation from the mean scores for each category, before being used to give a single, overall “score” in terms of the full influence that each feed can be said to exert. What does this tell us? Well, broadly speaking, it allows us to pinpoint those feeds that have the largest “centre of gravity” on Twitter around technology-related topics. The chances are if you read an opinion about a device or process on the internet in the UK, these Twitter feeds probably had at least some impact on how people see that device or piece of software. This could also be used to map the likelihood that a new thing will become popular. You can probably bet that if something is featured on the number one feed, it’ll experience a huge upsurge or downsurge in popularity depending on how the tweet in question views it.
