According to the study, "The correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”
Dr. Bernardo A. Huberman, the director of Hewlett-Packard Labs’ Social Computing Lab, and his team analyzed 22 million tweets over 300 hours in September 2009 in order to concoct what he calls the IP Algorithm, which highlights influential Twitter users by assigning them both a score for influence and passivity.
Passivity is the tendency of many followers to passively peruse tweets without sharing them (i.e. retweeting them) with their network. According to the study, the average Twitter user retweets only one in 318 URLs.
Those Twitter users who are truly influential are able to break through this blase shell and impel their followers to share their tweets with the rest of the Twit-o-sphere. Check out the most influential Twitterers below (Mashable got a mention), as well as the most popular, yet not-so-influential users.
The study appears to only measure retweeted links, though, which adds an interesting element to the results. Naturally Mashable would reign supreme over other Twitterers, as the majority of what we tweet is links. As we know, there's more to influence than sharing links -- engagement comes in all forms (at-replys, retweeting sentiments, etc).
Are you surprised by these results? There are a ton of tools out there that can help you gauge your own influence -- Klout works pretty well by classifying what kind of Twitter user you are. How do you think you measure up? Check out the full study below if you're keen to know more.