Daniel Romero, a Ph.D Candidate at Cornell University, worked with HP to come up with a list of the 100 most influential media Twitter accounts. The algorithm measures such things as how frequently the accounts are retweeted and clicks per link. Here are the top 10…
| @name | Name | Followers | Influence Rank | |
| 1 | @mashable | Pete Cashmore | 2037840 | 59 |
| 2 | @cnnbrk | CNN Breaking News | 3224475 | 71 |
| 3 | @big_picture | The Big Picture | 23666 | 92 |
| 4 | @theonion | The Onion | 2289939 | 116 |
| 5 | @time | TIME.com | 2111832 | 143 |
| 6 | @breakingnews | Breaking News | 1795976 | 147 |
| 7 | @bbcbreaking | BBC Breaking News | 509756 | 168 |
| 8 | @espn | ESPN | 572577 | 187 |
| 9 | @harvardbiz | Harvard Business Rev | 219039 | 227 |
| 10 | @gizmodo | Gizmodo | 111025 | 237 |
Clearly, follower count doesn’t always map to influence. For example, you’ll notice a surprise at #3 — @big_picture, the Boston Globe’s photo blog, with only 23,666 followers. Writes Nur Bremmen on Memeburn, “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.”
There are a few more surprises in the top 100 list, posted here. (By the way, the Memeburn story says the tweets were analyzed from June 15th through July 22nd of last year, but the follower counts provided by the researcher match this year on those dates. Also, this list does not include “personalities,” just media brands.)
