Over the past four years, StatSocial and I have published an annual list of the top social media power influencers - that is, social media experts who have strong followings among people interested in social media. We published the list twice on Forbes.com. We published the 2015 list last week. Following on from that I have compiled a table to highlight what might be a group of up and coming social media leaders (though, yes there are some established names in there too).
Thanks to advances in StatSocial's technology, we are now able to take a much more granular look at who follows the leaders and at the different strengths of leader follower communities. Within this we have identified a group who have a strong social media following but who don't yet rank high in the leaders' list.
First, why a list? In the past people questioned the idea of a leaders' power list. Why bother compiling lists? Is it just click-bait? What should the criteria for inclusion be? Won't all lists of influencers fail one critical test if we rely on a score of follower numbers - namely that some writers have relatively small followings but a disproportionate influence because of their insights, intelligence or communications skills?
When we published the first list in 2012 there was still room to debate whether influencers has a sustainable role in marketing - now there are platforms, like Raynforest, designed specifically to link influencers with marketing campaigns. The argument about numbers hasn't gone away, but the value of some kind of metric of influence is gradually being accepted.
This year's list has been compiled by looking at the number of followers who are interested in important aspects of social media and social marketing. Specifically the leader group was measured according to the interest their followers have in:
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Social media
-
Marketing
-
Advertising
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Technology
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Business leaders
The baseline metric is how big is the identifiable community of a leader's followers' followers, ie the second degree network. That's what we call PULL. The pull number is now modified by a weighting.
For every influencer we measured the proportion of people who were interested in any one of several hundred topics, way down to things like which TV programs they tweeted about or wrote about in social media, or which individuals they followed, or which brands they showed an affinity with.
From all this data we isolated interests that could be categorized as social media, marketing, advertising, technology and business celebrity. In other words we isolated those in a follower group who had a really strong interest in social as a business activity.
If we were to redraw the 2015 list by using interest in social media as the sole criterion for selection then the top 25 would look very different from the one you see here on StatSocial's site. In the table below I have taken the top 300 out of our list of 2,000+. That is the top 300 across the five combined criteria. I have then ordered them by the strength of social media interests in their followers followers' group.
This group is then the core social media group. You can see that some of this people have quite underdeveloped pull metrics. However that is the point. It shows who is developing a core social audience.
Social Media Influencers Measured by 1 Interest: Social Media
Name |
Twitter_Handle |
Twitter_Pull |
weight |
Adjusted Pull |
|
1 |
Mari Smith |
2,401 |
0.604 |
1,449 |
|
2 |
Ian Cleary |
214 |
0.765 |
164 |
|
3 |
HeidiCohen |
207 |
0.787 |
163 |
|
4 |
Michael Stelzner |
688 |
0.708 |
487 |
|
5 |
Francisco Rosales |
250 |
0.738 |
185 |
|
6 |
Amy Porterfield |
732 |
0.636 |
465 |
|
7 |
Ann Smarty |
248 |
0.752 |
186 |
|
8 |
Denise Wakeman |
249 |
0.623 |
155 |
|
9 |
Tamar Weinberg |
341 |
0.760 |
259 |
|
10 |
Chris Garrett |
393 |
0.691 |
272 |
|
11 |
Cindy King |
214 |
0.672 |
144 |
|
12 |
Dan Zarrella |
648 |
0.747 |
484 |
|
13 |
Lee Odden |
574 |
0.768 |
441 |
|
14 |
Bradley Horowitz |
357 |
0.730 |
261 |
|
15 |
Mark Schaefer |
848 |
0.689 |
584 |
|
16 |
Jon Morrow |
254 |
0.657 |
167 |
|
17 |
Mandy Edwards |
468 |
0.681 |
319 |
|
18 |
Jason Falls |
860 |
0.717 |
616 |
|
19 |
Jeff Bullas |
1,816 |
0.600 |
1,090 |
|
20 |
Joe Fernandez |
223 |
0.742 |
165 |
|
21 |
Alex Macgillivray |
@amac |
269 |
0.618 |
166 |
22 |
Neal Schaffer |
963 |
0.652 |
628 |
|
23 |
Jay Baer |
1,100 |
0.707 |
778 |
|
24 |
Kristi Hines |
347 |
0.597 |
207 |
|
25 |
Michael Brenner |
369 |
0.744 |
275 |
This analysis is just the beginning of a broader slice and dice that is possible now that we can track the interests of followers. I personally know few people on this list but I did say above there are some familiar names. Of the less well know one, I would like to put the question to you the community - are many of these the names of future social media gurus? If so, how can we help them raise their profiles?
influencers / shutterstock