More Twitter Analysis: Influencers Don't Retweet

As part of our ongoing series in conjunction with Tableau Software and TweetStats, we've been looking at some of Twitter's most influential users. What it means to be a "top" user on Twitter has changed a lot since 2007. Recently we found out that a high number of followers, which most people use to judge the popularity of an account, doesn't actually really mean anything.

However, Twitter lists - where we identify our favorites as "most influential" or "essential" - are still revealing. Today we're using lists to unscientifically analyze what we think are some of the some of the most influential people and entities on Twitter.

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Editors Note: This post is part of a series ReadWriteWeb is producing in partnership with Tableau Software, where we examine interesting data sets relevant to technology trends today. You can use Tableau Public to create interactive visualizations like this and publish them to your own blog or website or anywhere online. This is the last week to enter Tableau's User Generated Graph Contest. Winner will receive a free trip to Web 2.0 and $500. Sign up before March 26.

We used a variety of lists to identify 485 accounts and then ran those names through Tableau's data visualization tools. What did we find? Surprisingly, the majority of influencers retweet fewer than 30% of the time.

Play With the Influencers

The top graph shows the distribution of total tweets from all of our influencers. You can play with the data yourself. When you select an account on the right you can see they fall in the larger @, retweet and hashtag trends. The data is from January and February.

The Data

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Thanks to TweetStats for providing the Twitter data.

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