Popularity is not Influence on Twitter

From this study

http://bit.ly/ciDdvL

The findings show that being popular on Twitter does not mean being influencer.

The study is based on an analysis of Twitter data using three metrics:

1) indegree,
2) retweets
3) mentions.

The findings in short:
" First, popular users who have high indegree are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions. Second, most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics. Third, influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic. We believe that these findings provide new insights for viral marketing and suggest that topological measures such as indegree alone reveals very little about the influence of a user."

The paper:
Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy
Meeyoung Cha Hamed Haddadiy Fabr´ıcio Benevenutoz Krishna P. Gummadi