RT @rossdawson: Measuring influence on Twitter: the state of the art progresses step by step http://bit.ly/rN371 #SocialMedia #Marketing

Influence is the topic of the moment (as well as the next decade). In the wake of our very successful Future of Influence Summit earlier this week, not one but two significant studies of influence on Twitter were released today.

An extensive study titled The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter, created measures for relative influence, tracking in detail 12 popular users. Commentary on this further down in this post, and a nice visual showing response density to these users below.

Rapleaf, whose CEO Auren Hoffman spoke at Future of Influence Summit, released a quite different report showing the change in the structure of the Twitter ecosystem in the period late-March to mid-June of this year, during which time Twitter usage grew 60%. Rapleaf, in the course of doing a study to identify influencers in one of their clients’ customer community, came up with some interesting statistic in the dynamics of the most prominent Twitter users.

The published elements of this study focused only on numbers of Twitter followers, which are only a moderate proxy of influence, though showed some interesting insights. One of the most prominent was that the “popularity gap” between the most prominent Twitter users and the rest is growing. This is not at all surprising, and we can expect this to continue to grow, while maintaining the power law distribution that typifies scalable networks.

Techcrunch has also written about this study.