What Is the Influence of Your Tweets?
What is the real-world impact of Twitter? It seems that one well-placed tweet can #makeAmericaGreatAgain – at least it got Donald Trump elected as US President, or did it? One year after his election, even the Russian press says Trump did not “Make America Great Again” . In this post I would like to explore if Twitter really can help an aspiring leader to change the world, promote a cause, or further his or her own career. I will start by looking at the Twitter behavior of the World’s most famous people, and then identify some characteristics of the most active or prominent twitterers. In a project with GDI Switzerland we have used prominence in Wikipedia to identify the most influential people in the (English speaking) world. Wikipedia’s notability criteria are a robust mechanism to filter out the most notable 800,000 people. We have then constructed the network among these 800,000 people by linking two people, if their Wikipedia pages are mutually linked. (We call this a bi-dir