[Daniel Romero is a Ph.D Candidate at Cornell Univeristy in the Center for Applied Mathematics. He works with Hewlett-Packard's Social Computing Lab Bernardo Huberman and colleagues.]

By Daniel M. Romero

The importance of mainstream news has changed with the advent and immense popularity of online social media.

The mainstream media is now aware that they have to be involved in the social media in order to keep their audience engaged. They understand that they no longer have complete control on what information people will attend to.

With social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc people can find the news they want even if the mainstream media may not be providing it to them. This is why today we see all major broadcast networks present and active on Twitter.

But are they as successful at social media as they are at mainstream media? Are they as influential as they are assumed to be in the offline world? Who are the most influential ones?

To answer these questions, we measured the influence of all the news media accounts on Twitter. We used the Influence-Passivity Algorithm discussed in a previous post at SVW: HP Twitter Study: Weak Link Between Popularity And Influence.

The data includes all tweets containing a URL from June 15^th through July 22^nd of 2009. You can find the list of the 100 most influential news media accounts here (and below).

Most of the major news broadcast networks are present in this list. However, they do not fully dominate it. We see blogs such as@mashable, @bigpicture, @gizmodo, @harvardbiz, among others with very high influence ranking and above major players from traditional media such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The list also includes the number of followers each account has. The same observation about the weak link between popularity and influence made in the previous post can be made here.

Having a large number of followers does not imply having influence in news social media. Furthermore, not having a large number of followers does not mean lack of influence.

A particularly interesting example is @bigpicture, a photo blog for the Boston Globe; with a mere 23K followers it is the 3rd most influential account on the list. After taking a look at some of the very high quality photographs tweeted by this account it becomes clear why people are willing to re-tweet them and why this account has so much influence.

This demonstrates that to be influential on Twitter news media networks have to keep their audience engaged through valuable tweets and not simply convince people to "follow them on Twitter".

The work on this project was done in collaboration with: Wojciech Galuba (@wgaluba); Sitaram Asur (@SitaramAsur); and Bernardo Huberman (@bhuberman)

Follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/DanielMRomero

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