Who Do You Need to Follow on Twitter? Top Influencers from Clinton Global Initiative
By, Seema Bhende, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, Social Innovation Practice, Senior Account Director
Ok, I need to admit it. I was a late bloomer with Twitter. When I joined Waggener Edstrom’s Social Innovation Practice ten months ago I quickly realized this agency lives and breathes social media and just updating my Facebook status was not going to cut it. A year ago, to stay in touch with the latest CSR and social impact news, I received countless daily newsletters that I would try to skim during my morning cup of coffee. I also had a stack of industry reading that sat by my bed tormenting me every night screaming “Read me! Read me!” but I always fell asleep on page one.
Enter Twitter. No more piles of paper and junk flooding my inbox – I now gather my social innovation news in real-time via TweetDeck. The social media gurus at Waggener Edstrom taught me about influence. At the end of the day, to understand Twitter, you need to understand influence. There are millions of people sharing mounds of insightful content every minute, but they only make an impact if people are listening.
In order to break through this clutter, WE developed twendz pro™ to mine social media dialogue, monitor key influencers and help companies engage with consumers online. As shared in yesterday’s blog post, our nifty tool uses a formula (sentiment influence + quantitative + qualitative analysis) that can help you understand who the most influential players are in your industry and more importantly, how to engage with them. Pretty slick, huh? We think so.
If you were following the CGI Twitter dialogue last week, you know there was A LOT of content being shared and a lot of messages competing for air time. I thought it would be interesting to use twendz pro™ to see who were the most influential people in the Twittersphere.
Below are the top 10 Twitter influencers* from CGI gleaned from twendz pro™, who were seen to have a strong voice in their respective areas of influence. Keep in mind, a person’s influence ranking changes day to day, given the fluidity of the Twitter landscape. These people were the most engaged influencers during the CGI because not only did they have a high number of followers, they were actively engaged in questions, replies, shared links, and constantly used hashtags in their tweets. Most of these influencers were retweeted at a high volume, demonstrating their broad reach.
CGI’s Top Ten Twitter Influencers
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@changemakers (307,137 followers)- Ashoka Changemakers is a global online community of action that connects people to share ideas, inspire and mentor each other, and find and support the best ideas in social innovation.
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@ClintonTweet (11,282 followers)- The host of last week’s events, the Clinton Foundation addresses urgent global problems through collaboration with the private sector, NGOs and other government entities. CGI gathers world leaders annually to turn ideas into action.
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@echoinggreen (330,900 followers)- Echoing Green is a global nonprofit that provides seed funding and technical assistance to emerging social entrepreneurs with ideas for social change.
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@johnwoodRTR (317,672 followers)- John Wood is the Founder of Room to Read and author of ‘Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.’
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@witnessorg (273,673 followers)- WITNESS is a human rights organization that provides training and support to local groups to use video in their human rights advocacy campaigns.
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@lancearmstrong (2,654,892 followers) – This iconic, 7-time Tour de France winner and full time cancer fighter is the spokesperson for LIVESTRONG.
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@sloane (7,721 followers)- A KIVA fellow, Sloane Berrent is a cause-based marketing and social branding consultant who blogs at The Causemopolitan.
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@VanJones68 (6,217 followers) – Van Jones is the award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean-energy economy. He wrote the NYTimes bestseller: Green Collar Economy.
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@WomenforWomen (4,733 followers) – WomenforWomen International helps women survivors of war rebuild their lives. Zainab Salbi is the ever-inspiring Founder and CEO.
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@govgranholm (16,325 followers)- Jennifer Granholm is the Canadian-born American Governor of Michigan (D).
*Followers as of September 24, 2010
Our BIG Takeaway
CONNECT.
Go find these influentials on Twitter and start following them. Their combined reach is 3,930,552 followers.
ENGAGE.
These folks know just a thing or two about influence and social innovation. Don’t just listen. Make an effort to find opportunities to create dialogue, extend conversations and offer up ideas. That’s the beauty of Twitter. We’ve all just engaged in a highly motivating event – CGI – now it’s time to extend the conversation and find ways to transform ideas into actionable plans.
Tune in tomorrow where we will discuss the ten most retweeted influencers from CGI and explain why their messages traveled to millions of readers.
WE9331
