Thoughts on politics and life from a liberal perspective

Tuesday 26 January 2010

Top 20 Lib Dem "influencers" on Twitter

Egged on by both Will Straw and Jonathan Sheppard and following on from the post I did this morning listing the 20 Lib Dems on Twitter with the most followers, here is a slightly different methodology.


Edelman have a web application called Tweet Level which claims to calculate the influence level of Twitterer. So what both Will and Jonathan have done is take the Labour and Tory top 20 lists respectively and put each of them through Tweet Level and then reordered the top 20. I have done the same for the Lib Dems. The value in brackets is where they were in the top 20 originally in terms of followers:


1 (2). Nick Clegg - 60
2 (1). Lib Dems - 57
=3 (8). Mark Pack - 55
=3 (19). Mark Thompson - 55
=5 (3). Jo Swinson - 54
=5 (9). Lib Dem Voice - 54
=5 (15). Will Howells - 54
8 (16). Andy Reeves - 52
10 (14). Jonathan Fryer - 45
11 (4). Vince Cable - 44
12 (6). Alan Belmore - 43
13 (10). Phil Willis - 42
14 (7). Toran Shaw - 40
15 (18). Sandra Gidley - 38
16 (20). Norman Lamb - 36
17 (13). Susan Kramer - 30
18 (11). Lembit Opik - 24
=19 (12). Julia Goldsworthy - 23
=19 (17). Graham Watson - 23


Of course this approach has a big problem. All we are doing is reordering the Top 20s. This takes no account of the fact that there may be Twitterers who are more influential but that didn't have enough followers to make the original top 20. For example, Stephen Glenn who just missed the cut coming in at 21 (or the Stephen Glenn position as he refers to it) has an influence score of 49 which would have put him in ninth position in this new list. I am sure there are loads more like this and in fact the top 20 would look very different if they were all included, for all the parties. But I don't have time to put every single Lib Dem tweeter through Tweet Level right now! Maybe someone else can have a crack?

And I refuse to believe that I am as influential as Dr Pack and more influential than every single MP except Nick Clegg on Twitter! What about Jo Swinson and Sandra Gidley's PMQs tweets for a start?

Anyway, it's all good fun until the next round of lists comes, probably tomorrow at this rate!

13 comments:

James Graham (Quaequam Blog!) said...

With my score of 51, I appear to be sandwiched between Andrew Reeves and Lynne Featherstone.

The list is ridiculous. Some of those MPs don't even tweet (Lembit?).

Jonathan Sheppard said...

What are you on about. Of course Im just as influential as Nick Clegg ;o)

Jonathan Sheppard said...

And of course Mark we already know how active you are on twitter - so surely that must have to be taken into account when compared to someone with lots of followers who never tweets. How many tweets are you up to now?

Duncan Stott said...

My score is 43. I didn't realise I was almost as influential as Dr Vince, but you can't argue with the numbers.

No, you can't.

Mark Pack said...

Actually, this looks not too bad an approach, allowing for - as you say - only having put 20 names in to it.

It seems to me reasonable that you're up near top of list as you quite often exchange messages back and forth with a wide range of people on Twitter (not just usual Lib Dem suspects).

If putting all the people on LD tweets in is to much work, how about parcelling it out amongst a few volunteers?

Matt said...

Woohoo! I, El_Cuervo, am more influential that Vince Cable (44.2)!

Sadly I'm unpopular (34.3) and untrustworthy (37.3), but we can't have everything.

Stephen Glenn said...

Oi! Dr Packula as you well know I tweet while out and about campaigning. This evening being the most recent example.

I'm sure if you did put in the effort to put Lib Dem Tweeters it would have to be a Stephen Glenn position -1 listing ;)

Mark Pack said...

I wonder if we could get "the Stephen Glenn position" into general usage...

Unknown said...

Another prime example of Glenn's Law of Mathematics where you draw up a list of size N and the Stephen Glenn position will be N+1

Letters From A Tory said...

"Of course this approach has a big problem."

Yup, Lembit Opik still featuring on a list of 'influential' Lib Dems is indeed a problem.

Joe Otten said...

OK so I score 30. OK. But "Your trust score (16.6) is low because the content that you tweet is either not credible, interesting or newsworthy."

No, give it to me straight. I can take it.

James Graham (Quaequam Blog!) said...

No, give it to me straight. I can take it.

I don't believe you.

Sarah McCulloch said...

Hmmm. I have a Tweetlevel score of 32, which should make me 17th on that list, and I'm not that big a Lib Dem...

Someone should really build a tool that will put everyone through tweet level with a key word in their Profile Information, like "Lib Dems", or "lawyer" and so on. Be pretty easy to knock up rankings after that.