Just came across an article (via @medavap, on Twitter, natch) entitled: 'Experts trump celebs as top Twitter influencers'

I thought it followed in nicely from the post I did on MentionMap and the importance of the influencers in your social graph a couple of days ago.

The article mentions research conducted by Northwestern University in the US, which concluded that, 'most “influential” users on Twitter were actually people with much lower profiles but who were experts in their own fields rather than celebrities with the most followers.'

Surely this comes as no surprise?

When you consider that many celebrities aren't really experts in many fields besides ones related to their profession, as well as one or two hobbies (Stephen Fry, as famous for being a polymath as anything else, is a clear exception), it stands to reason that they're much less likely to be intrumental in creating memes about, quantum physics, for argument's sake than, say, an expert in quantum physics would likely to be (not that I imagine Twitter is awash with experts in quantum physics, somehow, but you know what I mean...).

The point again, though, is that the main influencers in a Twitter trending topic - or any Internet meme - aren't always the people you might expect and, if you're trying to get something buzzing, it's worth thinking beyond the obvious.  It's just like targeting anything well - you look for the most relevant factors, not just where the volume is.

It turns out this story was first published by Mashable on 25 September, with a lot more information about the research and where to find it.  This lead me to a site called 'Pulse of the Tweeters', set up by the research team at Northwestern University, where you can check the latest trends on Twitter and find out who has been most influential in creating and building them.  Sadly, most of today's top trending topics tend to fly in the face of everything that's been said - with celebrities, broadcasters and other public figures the main voices in most of the top trending topics - but you can also see, if you click to the next page of profiles, all of the 'real' people taking part, without whom there would be no meme.