Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

The Million Follower Fallacy: Audience Size Doesn’t Prove Influence on Twitter by Sarah Perez reviews a study by Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabricio Benevenuto, and Krishna P. Gummadi* that gives the research data to back up what most social media pros already know – follower counts on Twitter are  “somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence.”

One of the most interesting points of Perez’s analysis is that the most influential Twitter accounts “hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed to being experts in just one area.”  While many brands on Twitter speak to a particular demographic or topic area; based on this study and the popularity of celebrity Twitter users like Sean “P Diffy” Combs (who tweets everything from concert dates to bible quotes), Twitter influencers seem to be seen as experts on a wide variety of topics.  In fact the study shows that “retweeted users tended to be content aggregation services.”

This information is particularity interesting when we as social media pros think about audience development on Twitter. As we look to develop audiences on Twitter when our clients are in a niche area, gaming, sports, retail etc., is it important to make sure that a brand’s voice offers (or even re-tweets) authoritative information on a wide variety of subjects? Perhaps it is important that a brand’s Twitter voice speaks to what is popular in and around their niche.  For instance, it could make sense for a sports blog to begins discussing a less than popular sport, or maybe they comment on the antics of celebrity athletes, or even the health care debate?

The difficulties in this theory are that it could be hard to reign in “diversifying.” How much is enough? What sorts of topics should a brand discuss? How often should a brand jump on a Twitter trend?  No matter what strategy employed it is my opinion that it is always vitally important that the tweets of any particular brand always reflect back not only to the brand’s core values but to the goals of that brand’s Twitter outreach.  After all, the content aggregation Twitter accounts and news channels are not only speaking on a wide variety of topics but these topics are targeted to speak to a particular niche (current events, politics, sports, etc) and stay on brand message (CNN is the “news leader”).

Do you think this study brings up a good point about diversifying content strategies or are niche approaches more effective? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Read more on the study here.

*(Study institutions included: Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Germany †Royal Veterinary College, University of London, United Kingdom ‡CS Dept., Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil)