In light of John Mayer’s decision to close his twitter account, I thought I would write a bit about the subject of influential twitterers (if that is even a word). For those who may not know, John Mayer, the often annoying ex of Jen Aniston has made the decision to shut down his twitter account. He had approx. 3.7million followers which is something every major brand would die for! To put in in perspective, John Mayer could tweet to every man, woman and child in Ireland! But dis anyone actually care what he wrote?

Dan Zarrella, Social Media Specialist has put together a list of influential twitterers based on CTR (click-through rate). It is an interesting but obviously not totally accurate state of play. CTR is the number of clicks divided by followers. He has recorded the following

So it seems the Kardashians are very influential on twitter. What does this mean in marketing terms? It means if I have a product I want to launch, I should go to them because they get a response from their followers. Its no good if you have 3.7m followers if they don’t care what you are saying.  Stephen Fry interestingly comes in at number 2. Mr Fry is well known for knowing everything about everything so when he posts a link, it can be assumed to be worth a click.

Applying this to your own brand, look at twitter followers like you do link building. Its better to have 10 really good links or in this case twitter followers than 100 crap links or 100 token followers. So when you are looking at your competitors hundreds of followers, don’t distress, you may have a bigger influence than them.