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:

Rank Sysomos MajesticSEO
1 @FoxNews @nytimes
2 @moooris @TIME
3 @AlohaArleen @FoxNews
4 @WayneMansfield @GuyKawasaki
5 @DaveMalby @Radioblogger
6 @Radioblogger @Tyrese
7 @barefoot_exec @chrisbrogan
8 @Mike_Wesely @Schofe
9 @ggw_bach @Alyssa_Milano
10 @rockingjude @wossy
11 @chrisbrogan @Agent_M
12 @djc8080 @EstelleDarlings
13 @nytimes @JeanetteJoy
14 @GuyKawasaki @AlohaArleen
15 @wossy @WayneMansfield
16 @Tyrese @barefoot_exec
17 @Alyssa_Milano @Mike_Wesely
18 @officialtila @DaveMalby
19 @Schofe @rockingjude
20 @Agent_M @moooris
21 @EstelleDarlings @judyrey
22 @TIME @djc8080
23 @CraigTeich @ggw_bach
24 @judyrey @officialtila
25 @JeanetteJoy

@CraigTeich

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.

Sysomos_TF

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.

Sysomos_CF

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.

**Sign up to Majestic Insights for more**

If you enjoyed this research, you are welcome to join Majestic Insights – a free service that will tell you when we produce more in-depth data, such as industry reports. Users signing up get our Twitter top 50,000 list as well. Click here to register.

Neep Hazarika

Comments

  • Travis James

    Seems the Sysomos report was built in 2009..

    August 15, 2014 at 11:54 pm
  • 40deuce

    Hi,

    This is very interesting to see. I’m sure that your Trust Flow system is very interesting.
    However, I’m curious as to why you would try to compare your data about Twitter accounts that get linked to across the web today to our study that was simply based around tweet volumes… from 5 years ago when Twitter was just starting to come into it’s own and be recognized by people around the world.

    This seems a lot like comparing apples from 5 years ago to oranges you bought today.

    Cheers,
    Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos

    August 16, 2014 at 12:15 am

Comments are closed.