Now that more marketers and agencies are participating on Twitter, they want to do more than just participate – they want content that influences user behavior. If influence is the silver bullet, are any brands that publish content doing a good job? How can they do it better?

What is Influence?

Influence boils down to three key dimensions:

-       Reach – What is your total audience?

-       Attention – How many people are listening to what you have to say?

-       Engagement – How many people interact with your content?

The lack of a standardized analytics platform has resulted in hundreds of different ways to look at influence on Twitter, and near impossible to do it with scale. But this study by Hewlett-Packard Labs is a compelling way to start thinking about how users affect each other in the Twitterverse. They used their HP Social Computing Lab to bring collective intelligence research and computing muscle to identify who does the best job of spreading their content on Twitter.

The 10 Most Influential Twitter Handles

1. Mashable – Social Media News
2. Jokoanwar – Film Director
3. Google – Google News
4. Aplusk – Actor
5. Syfy – Science Fiction Channel
6. Smashingmag – Online Developer Magazine
7. Michellemalkin – Conservative Commentator
8. Theonion – News Satire Organization
9. Rww – Tech/Social Media Blogger
10. Breakingnews – News Aggregator

According to the 2010 HP Study.

While some of these users have millions rather than thousands of followers, it’s not based on who’s the most popular. Instead, it’s based on a complex algorithm that measures:

Passivity – How often does a Twitter user ignore or not see content

Dedication – How often does a Twitter user engage with another Twitter user

Influence – Applies both the factors above to every Twitter user to score how well (or poorly) someone influences their followers with varying degrees of passivity and dedication.

Heady stuff.  But it makes sense – if you can get an army of bots to retweet you (and the assumption is they retweet everyone), that doesn’t make you influential.

Twitter users who can spread ideas via loyal, real followers have influence.

The Top Brands

So how to the top global brands stack up? When you compare HP’s list with the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands, a disconnect appears.

1. Google
2. IBM
3. Apple
4. Microsoft
5. Coke
6. McDonalds
7. Marlboro
8. China Mobile
9. GE
10. Vodafone

Google is the only name that managed to crack both. The most influential handles aren’t even companies, they’re personal brands. But Google, SyFy, Smashingmag, The Onion and Breaking News are proof that companies can be influential on Twitter.

So the question becomes – how do brands increase their influence?

Consolidate Your Presence

The “influentials” all had a single, focused feed that delivered content that laddered up to what their personal brand delivered.

In contrast, all “brands” had nearly a full page of verified and unverified Twitter accounts focused around internal company silos. (except China Mobile and Marlboro, who aren’t on Twitter).

Coke even had three separate verified “Official” Twitter accounts for the company.

Google did have Twitter accounts for their products, but unlike the other brands, the top result a single parent “Google” handle.

Include a Shortened Link

50 of the most recent 58 tweets from the list of influential users contained a shortened link from a service like bit.ly.  And according to Dan Zarella, nearly 70% of retweets are posts that contain a link.

Why? Consistently creating 140 characters of spreadable content is hard. REALLY hard. Brands shouldn’t shy away from creating robust, desirable content that can be linked to and use Twitter as the means to curate it.

Be Relevant and Add Value.

Developing a sound content strategy where you identify the content types your audience wants to consume is critical. Michelle Malkin brings conservative news and commentary to her republican followers. SyFy celebrates science fiction geekdom and gives Sci-Fi geeks a window into their favorite shows.

Contrast that with brand like IBM Design (@ibmdesign), which throws in news, design philosophy polls, inspirational technology quotes and technology predictions. It ends up being a hodge podge of content that doesn’t appear to have a clear purpose.

If you’re struggling to find the right mix of content for your followers, don’t worry. Everyone does. Creating compelling, relevant content isn’t easy and finding the secret sauce can be like hunting for a needle in a haystack.  When developing content strategies for Twitter think about:

-       Who is the brand talking to on Twitter?

-       What value are we giving our followers?

-       How are people already talking about our brand on Twitter?

-       What content do other people create that our followers will find compelling?

It’s O.K. to start narrow. Pick a topic, and do it well. Curate the best resources, and really think about how each and every tweet adds value for your followers. Measure. Look at what gets the most @replies and RTs. Study the ebb and flow of your followers list. Once you master one content type, add another.

And be more than just a retweeter.  You know your followers better than anyone – add some context to what you’re sharing and bubble up a deeper aspect of the content you know they’ll care about.  You’ll help them identify what they should pay attention to and establish your brand as a valuable resource instead of a robot.

Be Prolific.

For most users, their Twitter feed is a fire hose. Tweets don’t stay fresh for long, even if someone only follows 50 people.  Of the 50 most recent tweets in a curated list of the most influential Twitterers, every member of the “influentials” showed up once in the past three hours.

Map out the content your brand is creating in an editorial calendar. All of the most prolific Twitterers schedule their content and block out time to specifically brainstorm and create content that aligns with their brand goals.

Interact as Appropriate

There are a lot of best practice recommendations out there recommending you interact and connect with your followers – but in an analysis the hundred most recent tweets from both the “influentials” and the “brands” revealed little correlation between influence and % of tweets mentioning another user.

Interacting is important from a brand perspective, but in terms of influence, the impact appears negligible. If you’re a tech news brand, replying to other users might not be a good use of resources. But if you’re a brand where customer service and interaction is important, like Apple, developing a plan for engaging your followers is also a good strategy.

Bottom line – becoming influential takes focus, insight and most of all, time. Building the trust and dedication of a community isn’t earned overnight, but with a long-term strategy that focuses on providing value for your followers.