Sorry, Ashton. New research indicates that there's little correlation between one's follower count on Twitter and cultural influence. Researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million
active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then measured various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, "retweet" influence and mention influence.
And? Those with the largest number of followers may be "popular" Twitterers, but that's not necessarily related to their influence.
In other words, "High follower counts don't always mean
someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways," writes ReadWriteWeb. The researchers also examined the ability of Twitter users to influence others, and determined that the most
influential users hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed to being experts in just one area.