Indian followers of Top Twitterers
By Sandhya

Social media monitoring and analytics technology company Sysomos monitors blogs, Twitter, social networks, Wikis and other media to work out what happens on the net. Using this collated data, Sysomos clients have access to consumer sentiment, geo demographics and competitive intelligence.  Its latest report on the top Twitterers shows some have substantial following in India.

Sysomos has just analyzed Twitter users who follow some of the larger members of the Twitter community, and have worked out the global reach and authority rankings of five celebrities, five social media heavyweights and five media organizations. Each Twitter user was assigned an authority ranking between 0 to 10 - with 10 signifying someone with very high reach and influence. This authority ranking is based on the number of followers, following, updates, retweets and several similar measures used by Sysomos.

Sysomos found that while celebrities have a large number of followers, most of them are low authority users. On the other hand, social media heavyweights seem to attract fewer but very engaged Twitter users with high authority rankings.

In the News and Media Sources category, Sysomos analyzed some of the biggest old and new media websites in the world.  The five selected for research were New York Times, Time, Techcrunch, Mashable and Read Write Web.  Sysomos found that traditional media sources that deliver a variety of content such as Time.com and The New York Times appear to attract more people who are only using Twitter for information but have less interaction with the Twitter community. Not surprisingly, it found sources that specialize in social media attract users that are more active on Twitter. Purely online publications such as ReadWriteWeb and Mashable have a higher authority ranking and more connected Twitter followers than traditional news sources such as the New York Times.

What was interesting was that at least 4 of these 5 news and media sites had India in the list of top 10 followers by country.

New York Times was the only Twitter account where Indian Twitter users were not among the top 10 followers by country.  For Time, 3.3 % of followers were from India.  For Techcrunch, 3 % of followers were from India.  Mashable has 1.8 % followers from India and Read Write Web had 2.4 percent followers from our country.

In the ‘Celebrity’ category, top Twitterers like Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Barack Obama had India among the top 10 follower countries.