The 100 most influential news media Twitter accounts

Undoubtedly, the nature of news is changing with the advent and immense popularity of social media. Media is painfully aware it needs to be involved with the new social order to keep audiences engaged.

Social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, provide people with additional channels to not only get news about the world, but to involve their community and immediate sphere of influence. So social media enhances mainstream news by taking it to additional channels, but also fills a gap that mainstream news outlets are unable to fill.

Daniel Romero, a Ph.D Candidate at Cornell University in the Center for Applied Mathematics, asks the question: Are news operations as influential in social media as they are in mainstream media? Are they as influential as they are assumed to be in the offline world? Who are the most influential ones?

Romero answers these questions by using a study by HP Labs’ Social Computing Lab which attempts to measure influence on Twitter.

Using the HP Labs’ methodology, Romero builds a list of the “100 most influential news media accounts” (Seen below). Romero also makes a similar observation to that of the original study: There is a weak link between popularity and influence.

In many respects, it’s not rocket science. We’ve known for years in the offline world that a niche newspaper like the Mail & Guardian may have more or at least as much influence as a massively read tabloid like the Daily Sun or a popular broadsheet like the Sunday Times. A newspaper like the Mail & Guardian has but a fraction of the readership, but this is not too relevant in determining the paper’s influence in society.

And so we see the trend on Twitter: Having a large number of followers does not imply having influence. Moreover, not having a large number of followers does not mean lack of influence.

Romero cites an interesting US example: @bigpicture, a photo blog for the Boston Globe has a mere 23K followers, but it is the third-most influential account on the list of the Top 100. After taking a look at some of the very high quality photographs tweeted by this account it becomes clear why people are willing to retweet them and why this account has so much influence.

So here, below, is the “100 most influential news media Twitter accounts”. The study is fairly US-centric, with some international additions, but demonstrates some interesting insights. The data includes all tweets containing a URL from June 15th through July 22nd of 2009.