Twitter's most powerful tech investor: Ashton Kutcher

Investors not just ranked by followers, but by influence and network reach

I hear stories all the time about some celebrity who just took over the top spot among Twitter followers. I think at one point it was Justin Beiber. Or maybe Lady Gaga. But, honestly, who cares? Does having a million people listen to what you have to say actually mean anything?

Perhaps it does, and social audience measurement platform PeekAnalytics has figured out a way to determine how influential a person is across a slew of social networks, compiling the list of the top 1,000 tech investors on Twitter and ranking them based on influence.

The report, released on Thursday, says that Ashton Kutcher is the most powerful tech investor on Twitter.

So how exactly is “influence” measured?

It is based on “pull quotient,” number of followers and network size.

Pull quotient is the number of followers a person has, multiplied by how many people are in multple networks of those who are following that person. That way, it becomes now just about how many people are following that person on Twitter, but how far their message is able to be spread across the internet.

“…the Pull Quotient (PQ) is a good measure of how influential any given Twitter audience is, compared to the average Twitter account – 1x is average, 2x is twice as much as average, and so on. Influence, for the purposes of this calculation, is gauged by how well connected someone’s Twitter followers are not just on Twitter, but across sixty social sites, compared to the average consumer,” is how PeekAnalytics explains it.

Network size is the average number of connections that the person’s followers have across social media platforms.

Ashton Kutcher, for example, has 11,653,884 followers, but a small network size of 403. Because he has so many followers, though, he has a social pull of 4852x. Kutcher can potentially reach nearly 850 million people.

PeekAnalytics has made it so that simply having a lot of followers will not nessarily give a person a high ranking. Al Gore comes in second in terms of followers on the list, with 2,466,434 users, but his network size is only 636, giving him a social pull of 1,705x, putting him at eighth place overall. Gore only has the potential to reach less than 300 million people.

Even though Al Gore has more followers than Guy Kawaski, Virgin founder Richard Branson, and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, both from The Obvious Corporation, his followers are less connected to other networks and, therefore, the other investors outrank him.

Other big names who made the top 100: Digg founder Kevin Rose at No. 10, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban at No. 12, Napster co-founder Sean Parker at No. 40, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman at No. 50, Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget at No. 67, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak at No. 73, and Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus at No. 96.

There is a bit of distressing news on this list: there are only two women in the top 30.

Yahoo’s newly appointed CEO Marissa Mayer, who comes in at No. 30, and Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior, in at No. 24.

 (Image source: fantom-xp.com)