Supply Chain Power Influencers on Twitter

Social media has been adopted by supply chain management professionals as a mechanism to express opinions and disseminate knowledge. Since there is too much information floating around, many people rely on “influencers” who exhibit expertise, enthusiasm or credibility. Then, this article will show how the influencers in supply chain management can be identified.

Background
In January 2012, Forbes published the article named “Who Are The Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers?” in the attempt to identify top social media writers and experts on Twitter. We dig deeper and find that identification of social media influencer also get attention from academia.

In 2011, a research team consists of the experts from University of Michigan and Yahoo, Inc published the article named “Everyone’s an Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter”. Under this study, 74 million events from from 1.6 million Twitter users were analyzed. The result shows that contents shared by a user with a large network (high number of followers and friends of followers) may not spread widely because people choose to pass along information from some specific users (influencers). In short, level of influence is associated with a number of retweets not a number of followers.

Related Metrics
There are 3 other metrics dedicated to the measurement of social media influence as below,

1. Klout develops Klout Score, the number between 1-100 that represent influence (the ability to drive action). Other factors such as size of network, type of networks each person is in, length of time, how active each user is, are also used to calculate a final score.
2. Kred analyzes tweets  from the last 1,000 days to determine influence score. Retweeted, Replied, Mentioned and Followed are taken into consideration and the score is on a 1,000 point scale.
3. Peerindex  measures how contents you post are retweeted, shared on Facebook and +1 on Google Plus by other people in the same subject area.

Data Collection
As you may notice, “retweet” is the key metric for influence measurement and each database adds its own secret ingredients. In order to access and retrieve data at scale from Klout, Kred or Peerindex, enterprise level subscription is required. Then, we use “Buzzsumo” as an alternative data source and data collection is performed as below,

1. We search twitter profile based on broad keyword search.
2. Buzzsumo returns about 2,000 twitter profiles.
3. “Average Retweets” or “the average number of retweets each user get per tweet” is used as a ranking metric.
4. Irrelevant users are removed.
5. Many users/companies have multiple accounts so only one account is considered.

Results
And the list of Supply Chain Power Influencers on Twitter is presented in no particular order as below.

Note: please enable java on your browser and please refresh the page if the list doesn’t display properly.

Source: SupplyChainOpz