In this study conducted by Sysomos, the most active users of Twitter were classified according to the profiles based on the number of tweets. While analysing the top 25 profiles in the article, based on the highest average number of tweets per day, we discovered that many profiles simply had too few backlinks to be of a high quality, indicating that using activity alone does not provide a good representation of categorization. The logic is that the approach used by Sysomos to list the most active users of Twitter may not be as powerful as Trust Flow.

We will demonstrate that using MajesticSEO’s Trust Flow helps, among other things, to alleviate this rather significant drawback in using Twitter’s data alone to determine the importance of any Twitter profile. In this research, we propose a more robust scheme of classification of the top Twitter users based on a methodology that employs MajesticSEO’s metrics to determine the quality of the websites that link to the Twitter profiles.

Rankings based on MajesticSEO’s Metrics

The Sysomos top 25 list sorted by Trust Flow can be downloaded here as an Excel spreadsheet. Let’s look at them below, ranked firstly in Sysomos’s order of decreasing Tweet count and then in Majestic’s order of decreasing Trustflow, as shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1: Rankings of Twitter Users by Sysomos and Majestic

A screen shot of the first three entries as generated by MajesticSEO’s Bulk Backlink Checker provides the site summary shown in Figure 2.

1: New York Times; 2: TIME; 3: Fox News

Figure 2: Screen Shot of Twitter users sorted by Trust Flow

Note that news and media lead the rankings when sorted by Trust Flow. In their article, Sysomos reported Wayne Mansfield as one of the most active people on Twitter, with nearly 90 tweets a day and over 60,000 followers. However, using Trust Flow, it is noticed that the New York Times heads the list, with a Trust Flow of 54 and 107199 external backlinks, far ahead of Wayne Mansfield who has a Trust Flow of 12 and only 109 external backlinks. This implies that not much is revealed about the quality of his profile (if, for example, all of his followers are bots and all of his tweets are automated).

The corresponding ordered list sorted by Citation Flow can be downloaded here. This produces a slightly different listing but again, the rankings corroborate our findings above. A screen shot of the first three entries is displayed in Figure 3. News and media still lead the rankings, although Fox News has been relegated to fourth place.

1: TIME; 2: New York Times; 3: Chris Brogan

Figure 3: Screen Shot of Twitter users sorted by Citation Flow

Conclusions

This study provides a different and more versatile methodology for measuring the importance of a Twitter profile based on the number and the quality of websites that link to a particular profile. A comprehensive account of the methodology employed in this posting can be found in this Forbes article.

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Neep Hazarika

I obtained a Bachelor of Technology degreein Aeronautical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. I went on to obtain a Master's and a PhD degree in Aerospace Engineering and Computational Fluid Dynamics respectively, from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. I have worked in a wide range of areas in academia and industry.

Latest posts by Neep Hazarika (see all)

• Ranking of Top Data Scientists on Twitter using MajesticSEO’s Metrics - August 19, 2014
• Measuring Twitter Profile Quality - August 14, 2014
• PageRank, TrustFlow and the Search Universe - July 7, 2014

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