There is no end to the research on social media coming out of academia The latest is from Meeyoung Cha from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, according to the Harvard Business Review.
Cha looked at data from all 52 million Twitter accounts and more closely at the 6 million "active users" and determined that the number of followers a Tweeter has is largely meaningless. "Popular users who have a high indegree [number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions," she said. "Our claim is that follower count is not sufficient to capture the influence of a user (i.e., the ability of an user to sway the opinions of her followers)," she said in the Q&A.
How to Measure Influence Then?
A more interesting question would be how should one measure influence, she continues. Unfortunately there is no one easy answer to that, she says. "One would have to take a combination of many metrics, including follower count, mentions, and re-tweets. However the hard part is figuring out the relative importance of the component metrics. This is the subject of our future research."
In the meanwhile, businesses could try to increase audience responsiveness in their fields. Cha says that there is research investigating the roles of different types of users such as mass media or small businesses or grassroots users. Not surprisingly, mass media played a significant role in spreading popular topics but for non-popular or niche topics, small businesses and opinion leaders were far more effective in engaging audience than mass media, she said.
Other Studies
There have been a number of industry studies as well that have tried to quantify the value of a fan base on social media - oftentimes with conflicting findings. A new study by Edison Research found it may not be worthwhile for some companies to focus their online marketing efforts on the micro-blogging site.
While the data show it is a popular venue, it also suggests that Twitter users do not necessarily convert brand awareness to usage, Social Media Today says. Although 87% of Americans have heard of Twitter - only 7% actually use it. Compare that to Facebook, where 88% have heard of it, and 41% have a profile, which is a conversion rate approaching 50%.
The other studies include a small but now infamous study by Vitrue that found one fan on Facebook is worth $3.60 and a Facebook Page with one million fans is worth a minimum of $3.6 million in earned media annually.
The study closest to Cha's finding was a recently released HubSpot report that covered the statistical analysis of 1,400 customers' inbound marketing activities. It found that the largest jump in leads took place once customers garnered several hundred followers. But 500 appears to be the cut off point as "leads may not continue to rise with Twitter reach beyond multiple hundreds of followers."
Perhaps this is due to the challenge of growing engaged followers, HubSpot speculated. "These more engaged individuals are those who will retweet content to their own followers, visit the company web site when enticed to do so, and/or post updates on topics related to the customer's areas of interest. Leads are more likely to come directly and indirectly through these more engaged individuals."
