NOTE: We’ve updated this list: 2012 Most Influential Small Business People on Twitter.
Can Twitter experts help small business owners improve their businesses?
We think so! In fact, we’re so convinced about it that we’ve tried to identify (objectively, of course) the most influential people in small business on Twitter. (The process we used to develop the list is described at the bottom of this blog post!). The ranking shows not only the person’s name and Twitter handle, but also their peer rating percentage based on our measurements and their “Klout” score to give you an idea of how their tool measures someone’s overall Twitter presence (not necessarily their impact with the small business space, which is more interesting to us!).
Make sure to follow us! Follow @dandb
We hope to accomplish a couple of things with this list:
- Measure who is influential in the small business world on Twitter
- Provide a helpful list of people to follow for those from the small business community new to Twitter
Without further ado, here’s the list of The Most Influential People in Small Business on Twitter:
| Name | Klout Score | Peer Follows | |
| Chris Brogan | @chrisbrogan | 76 | 100% |
| Gary Vaynerchuk | @garyvee | 74 | 89% |
| Scott Stratten | @unmarketing | 81 | 89% |
| Brian Clark | @copyblogger | 73 | 84% |
| John Jantsch | @ducttape | 74 | 84% |
| Darren Rowse | @problogger | 79 | 84% |
| Liz Strauss | @lizstrauss | 74 | 74% |
| Mari Smith | @MariSmith | 74 | 74% |
| Lisa Barone | @lisabarone | 65 | 74% |
| Jonathan Fields | @jonathanfields | 69 | 74% |
| Brian Solis | @briansolis | 77 | 68% |
| Robert Scoble | @Scobleizer | 80 | 68% |
| Jeremiah Owyang | @jowyang | 77 | 68% |
| Wendy Piersall | @emom | 54 | 68% |
| Tony Hsieh | @zappos | 66 | 68% |
| Ann Handley | @MarketingProfs | 76 | 68% |
| Jason Falls | @jasonfalls | 74 | 68% |
| Jim Kukral | @JimKukral | 64 | 63% |
| Laura Fitton | @Pistachio | 67 | 63% |
| Dan Schawbel | @DanSchawbel | 73 | 63% |
| Amber Naslund | @AmberCadabra | 71 | 63% |
| Valeria Maltoni | @ConversationAge | 62 | 63% |
| Chris Guillebeau | @chrisguillebeau | 68 | 63% |
| Chris Garrett | @chrisgarrett | 59 | 58% |
| Marshall Kirkpatrick | @marshallk | 72 | 58% |
| Mack Collier | @MackCollier | 69 | 58% |
| Guy Kawasaki | @GuyKawasaki | 85 | 58% |
| David Meerman Scott | @dmscott | 68 | 58% |
| Shannon Paul | @ShannonPaul | 60 | 58% |
| Pamela Slim | @pamslim | 67 | 58% |
| Justin Levy | @justinlevy | 61 | 58% |
| C.C. Chapman | @cc_chapman | 71 | 53% |
| Danny Sullivan | @dannysullivan | 71 | 53% |
| Lee Odden | @leeodden | 65 | 53% |
| Pete Cashmore | @mashable | 88 | 53% |
| Shashi Bellamkonda | @shashib | 67 | 53% |
| Anita Campbell | @smallbiztrends | 71 | 53% |
| Ed Shahzade | @Ed | 67 | 53% |
| Shama Kabani | @shama | 54 | 53% |
| Sarah Evans | @prsarahevans | 72 | 53% |
| James Chartrand | @MenwithPens | 54 | 53% |
| Carrie Wilkerson | @barefoot_exec | 73 | 53% |
| Derek Halpern | @derekhalpern | 58 | 53% |
| Wayne Sutton | @waynesutton | 65 | 47% |
| Douglas Karr | @douglaskarr | 60 | 47% |
| Hugh MacLeod | @gapingvoid | 66 | 47% |
| Julia Roy | @juliaroy | 55 | 47% |
| Jeff Keni Pulver | @jeffpulver | 73 | 47% |
| David Armano | @armano | 73 | 47% |
| Aaron Brazell | @technosailor | 61 | 47% |
| Michael Gray | @graywolf | 67 | 47% |
| Scott Monty | @ScottMonty | 69 | 47% |
| Terry St. Marie | @Starbucker | 58 | 47% |
| Stephanie Agresta | @stephagresta | 48 | 47% |
| Reem Abeidoh | @rabeidoh | 48 | 47% |
| Erin Kotecki Vest | @QueenofSpain | 71 | 47% |
| Sonia Simone | @soniasimone | 54 | 47% |
| Aaron Strout | @AaronStrout | 65 | 47% |
| Christine Perkett | @missusP | 65 | 47% |
| SarahRobinson | @SarahRobinson | 64 | 47% |
| Jay Baer | @jaybaer | 76 | 47% |
| Jason Keath | @jasonkeath | 66 | 47% |
| Dharmesh Shah | @dharmesh | 67 | 47% |
| Lynn Terry | @lynnterry | 53 | 47% |
| Lewis Howes | @LewisHowes | 67 | 47% |
| Warren Whitlock | @WarrenWhitlock | 71 | 47% |
| Kristi Hines | @kikolani | 67 | 47% |
| Lisa Petrilli | @LisaPetrilli | 65 | 47% |
While we’re a relatively new twitter account, we’d love to break into our own list of most influential Twitter accounts, so help us out by giving @DandB a follow! 
[UPDATE: If you're interested in following some (or many) of these people, it's probably easiest to do it from the Twitter List that we created: @dandb/smallbiz-most-influential/members]
Methodology
What’s behind this list?
First off, the logic we’re using in defining “influence” is to assume that if a bunch of influential people in a community follow someone, then that’s a great indication that they’re influential. The flipside is that if someone can’t get influential people within a community to follow them, then it follows that they aren’t likely all that influential.
More specifically, we started with 10 relatively random people from the small business community who met a specific criteria (they had to be following at least 50 people, but not more than 1500 and have at least 3X more followers than following to make sure we eliminated all the people who simply follow “everyone” back). We then summed up all the people that these 10 were following to create a new list of influential people within their “shared” community. Interestingly, we ended up with 19 people who met some specific criteria so that we could use them in the second iteration (The criteria were: 4 of the 10 initial people had to be following them & they had to be following under 10K people.)
With these 19 people, we then ran a complete analysis to see who their “shared” followers were. The results speak for themselves in the above list as I think it does a great job capturing the influential people in the small business community! (By the way, if you’re curious to see a similar process used in a different niche, here’s a similar list of the most influential Twitter people in the real estate space I developed a few years ago).
I’d be happy to get super-specific with more details if you’re curious. Just ask your questions in the comments!
Did you know?
Our social media team at Dun & Bradstreet Credibility has been organizing the CredibilityLIVE events, where we’re bringing credit and credibility experts to talk with our community via live interactive video conversations. We’ve had hugely successful events with experts like John Assaraf and Paul Chaney… and we’re very excited to bring Steve Strauss to CredibilityLIVE this Thursday (6/23). If you’re one of the “most” influential people interested in sharing your knowledge with our community, let us know! Email: socialmedia [at] dandb.com!
Final Thoughts
What makes this list interesting is that the ranking (and the attendant math that went into determining it) is all based on these influencers’ peers within the Twitter community. It’s becoming clear on Twitter that total numbers of followers is meaningless – anyone can get a bunch of followers pretty easily. However, if small business owners can key into a group of true small business influencers, they may discover the tools that can give their businesses a bump. Whether or not that happens, we’re really looking forward to hearing your reactions to this list – so let us hear it!
UPDATE:
A huge thanks to Sarah Needleman of the Wall Street Journal for the great write up of this article: Twitter’s Small Business Big Shots.
We think she did a great job getting at the essence of what made the list special for those who made the cut!
About Dustin Luther
This is a great list! Thank you to such creative and inspiring entrepreneurs!
Glad you appreciate the list! and I agree it really is a great list of people!
Fantastic list and very useful for many small businesses. I totally agree with this:
“It’s becoming clear on Twitter that total numbers of followers is meaningless – anyone can get a bunch of followers pretty easily. However, if small business owners can key into a group of true small business influencers, they may discover the tools that can give their businesses a bump.”
If you focus on quality (quality people in your network + quality content), the quantity comes over time. Plus, yes it’s important who you know… but more importantly it’s who knows you. The help of a small handful of influencers can really boost a small businesses’ traffic, subscribers, friends/fans/followers, and ultimately sales.
Well done, Dustin – keep up the great work!!
Awesome Mari! So glad you appreciate the work that went into creating the list! The idea behind it is something I’ve been playing with for quite some time and glad the D&B Credibility team has let me explore!
Like!
Good stuff Dustin as I discovered some inspiring new people and great that you included at least one person from outside America (Darren Rowse) maybe more am not sure. What tool did you use to create your peer following percentage? There is a great tool twlists that enables people to follow all these great people with one click too if you add them to a list in there
Michael
Hi Michael: Glad you found the list useful!
The approach we used was pretty manual… In that we did a bunch of Twitter API lookups and then used a google spreadsheet to copy, paste, sort, sum, iterate, etc, the results till the list popped out! I tried to explain it a little bit in our methodology section, but truth be told, it was quite labor intensive. Good news (from my perspective) is that the results are pretty compelling and we’re talking about building a more streamlined process going forward.
Sorry Dustin not twlists it is callled twitlists here is an example list very easy to make http://twitlist.us/lists/media-technology
Thanks Dustin for compiling this list and thanks for making this list “followable”. Since folks on this list share a lot of their good article that they are reading this will be a good curated content.
I am glad you used both PeerIndex and Klout to try to make this list as objective as possibleand sorry about all the manual work you had to do.
Honored to be on the list.
Thanks,
Shashi Bellamkonda
Shashi: Thanks for the comments! The manual work is part of the fun! And you definitely have your peers to thank for being included! Best!
I clicked over to this list hoping for some people with unique insights. Instead, I find the majority of the same rehashed names as usual, and ones that charge five figures to speak, never mind consult.
How that is affordable and beneficial to small business owners?
Great question James! And I think it actually bodes well for the algorithm that you’re not particularly surprised at who tops the list.
In terms of being useful to a small business owner, two ideas come to mind. The first is that these this is a list of folks that are most able to amplify an interesting marketing message, so if you can develop a relationship with one or a few of these people that can do wonders for improving the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign. The second is that this list of people became influential because they’re consistently publishing and/or curating interesting content, so there’s lots to be learned by simply following and listening to these guys!
Hope that helps!
How have you defined “small business”?
For the purpose of this exercise, small business was defined pretty loosely… As in people who are active within the small business community. Since we weren’t looking at the financials of any of the people/companies involved in this analysis, it didn’t make sense to define it any more specifically.
Wowzer. Honored to be included. I think a few of the entries are less small business focused than others, but still offer great content for any business. Very humbling to be included, regardless. Thank you!
Totally agree that some people are more small business focused than others… The “best” way to interpret this list is that it’s who the influential people within the small business community find influential… Some times those people are prominent within the small business community… and other times those people are simply influential to the community (Robert Scoble and Tony Hsieh come to mind).
Thanks for taking the considerable effort to put this together. Delighted to be included. Lots of very strong folks on this list, at least 47% of whom are friends evidently.
Thanks for this, Dustin. Lots of people I respect a great deal on this list, and I appreciate that you put so much effort into compiling the list. Also delighted to be included in such great professional company!
Very cool, flattered to round out the top 3. Thanks!
Dustin! Thanks for the inclusion on the list, it makes my day to be included in such a credible lot, and the fact that almost all of them are friends is a joy to boot. Thanks again!
Great list Dustin and it’s an honor to be included. Many of the people here are peers and friends – a testament to the connections methodology. As a creator of such lists myself, I can only imagine the work that you put into it.
Thanks for the inclusion Dustin. Would love to see the geeky breakdown of the numbers/technique if it is out there somewhere.
Great list and I really appreciate this type of data research. But I am curious who gets to be on the list exactly? Do they have to be a part of a small business or just followed by small biz folks? If the latter how do you determine someone on Twitter is part of a small business. Has me curious. Plenty of people on the list work for some very large companies.
All great questions Jason! There were no requirements for being included on the list whatsoever…
It all flowed from a look at who people within the small business space follow. Influence is a tough nut to crack, and I like to think that one of the hardest things to crack is getting followed by someone I call “selective influentials”… That is someone who is influential in their own right AND selective in who they follow. In practice this means that the follows of someone like Chris Brogan (who follows >130K accounts) doesn’t carry much weight because he pretty much follows everyone back, while the follows of someone like Bryan Clark (@copyblogger), who follows < 130 accounts, gets a lot more weight.
Nonetheless, at the end of the day, someone like Chris Brogan who really doesn't get a vote in the rankings (because he follows too many people back) can still rank really well if the "selective influentials" follow him (as they do).
What I like about this logic is the process for "gaming" the list is pretty straightforward, but extremely hard to execute. You've gotta get the influential people who selectively follow people to follow you.
Holy Cow. Thrilled, honored and humbled to make a list with so many – well – famous people!! Thank you so much including me. Plus, I get to make sure I’m following all these fab people – yay!!!
Terrific service, thanks so much. Totally concur with @chrisbrogan at the top, his 100% peer rating speaks for itself.
Many of the others are no surprise and richly deserved; but there’s a bunch on here I don’t know, and what a great resource for finding out more about them.
Again, many thanks,
@charleshgreen
Charles H. Green
Trusted Advisor Associates
Thanks for including me Dustin.
I’m with Jason Keath here. I’d love to hear more about how this list was created (I’m in love with data
)
This is a great list, and I have no doubt that Chris Brogan deserves to top it. Happy to see so many wonderful people that I follow and interact with here: Jonathan Fields, Chris Guillebeau, Pam Slim, Sarah Robinson, Ann Handley, Scott Stratten, Amber Naslund, CC Chapman. All good, smart people who actually engage with their tribes and share valuable information.
However… if “When They Talk, People Listen” is a measure of influence — which in my book, it is — then your roster also HAS to include Gini Dietrich, Danny Brown, Danielle LaPorte, Marie Forleo, John Haydon, Mark Silver, Shelly Kramer, Erika Napolitano, Tamsen McMahon…and probably another couple dozen people I’ll think of later.
Interesting start of a conversation: Who really influences you… and in what way?
Thanks for sharing some about how the list was created! Love to hear more about how you are defining and measuring subject matter expertise in the area of small business.
Fascinating list here! I was struck by the number of people on it who are signed up with the social media stock market game Empire Avenue (37/68) so I wrote a blog post about that. I think of particular interest is that the lion’s share of the people on this list with the highest Klout scores are signed up with Empire Avenue – for instance all of the top 5 Klout scorers on your list have Empire Avenue accounts. You can see the results of my list sorting @ http://eavshar.es/eavshares-member-blogs/entry/an-empire-avenue-view-of-dun-and-bradstreets-most-influential-small-business-people-on-twitter-klout-sorted
I have a great deal of respect for those on this list but the data collection methodology baffles me. Any time you take 10 random people, I would suspect it would produce at least a significantly different list. It is a disservice to label this list “The Most Influential Small Business People on Twitter” when that is far from the case. There are many people missing from this list who are more influential to small business owners than at least half of those listed – Shelly Kramer (K 76), Danny Brown (K 72), Jeff Bullas (K 82) – are a few that come to mind. Heck, my own Klout is 81. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be “Twitter Users Small Business People May Want to Follow.”
Hi Sharon:
You’re not the only one that’s a bit baffled by the initial “10 random people” concept. In explaining it to dozens of people over the past few days, I think I’ve come to a better (and just as accurate) way to describe how I started. In reality, we started with a few hundred people who we “knew” were in the small business community. However, we wanted to focus on people who were selective in who they followed because if someone’s not selective, then their follow (or “vote” for that person) is not strong.
Once we identified 10 people on the list who were selective in who they followed (i.e. they followed between 100 and 1500 and had 3X as many people following them), then we had a good basis to use them as the seed group for determining who were the actual “selective influencers” to run the analysis on.
In terms of the klout scores, it’s a good rough metric, but not particularly useful for most of the social media marketing campaigns that I’ve run. I’ve seen people with high klout scores who don’t drive any meaningful traffic with their tweets/retweets… and more importantly, a high klout score doesn’t tell me which niche they’re going to be able to help me amplify my message.
Focusing on folks who are being “followed” by influential people within a niche has been a much better indicator for my social media campaigns and much harder metric to game.
Hi Dustin, thanks for the detailed response. I actually agree with your assessment of Klout. I do understand your methodology although I don’t necessarily agree that it is an accurate reflection of influence level. The issue was not so much with the list itself or how you went about gathering it; it was how you positioned the list.
Thanks for the detailed analysis Dustin — I am thrilled to be included on this list with so many friends and peers I admire.
If we can use our influence to help, support, inspire and inform the small business market, economic progress will happen in the overall economy. I believe deeply in the power and will of entrepreneurs.
All the best,
-Pam
Escape from Cubicle Nation
I dunno. Seems a tad tautological to me. You’re influential because you influence people?
Thanks for including me on the list. Normally I’m not a big fan of “lists” but I like this one and how you did it, and I’d say that even if I wasn’t on it.
Influence is the key metric for sure. Followers mean really nothing.
Awesome list, and great effort putting it together. Many recognizable, but a few I’m not familiar with but that I’ll def check out. Thanks!
Thanks, There are some great people we’ve never checked out before.
I’m not sure I completely buy the argument regarding peer follows. For example, let’s say some small business person has a Klout score of around 60, but not as high on the peer follows. How did they get that Klout score? They must be influencing somebody, right? Probably small business owners directly, rather than peers.
Continuing that logic, if someone has an equal Klout score, but lower peer follows, it would seem that they are actually more DIRECTLY influential than those with higher peer follows. Those with high peer follows would be the proverbial fishbowl…a more enclosed conversation…vs those with more direct influence.
OK, not to quibble, but a couple of other things I noticed:
1) The vast majority of these people basically auto-follow – they have pretty close to a 1:1 follower/followed ratio. So pretty much anyone could come along, follow all these people, and take care of the peer follows column. (Oops — did I just give away my strategy?
)
2) I checked my stats:
Klout: 49
Peer follows: 50 out of the 68 people on this list = 74%
And yet I’m not on the list? I’m not insulted or anything… just wondering what’s wrong with the algorithm or process.
Scott,
You’re definitely thinking about this the right way… and highlighted a problem that I tried to avoid. For peer follows, I wasn’t using this list because so many of the people autofollow. The peer follows were determined by the top 19 folks who fit the “selective follower” criteria, not all of whom even made this list.
Hope that helps clarify things a bit!
Got it… makes sense. I guess I’m still longing for those glory days of my social media celebrity… you know, back before I got a real job.
And sorry for the implication that there was something wrong with the algorithm or process — poor choice of words. Should’ve included “or that I’m misunderstanding”.
No problem at all! I really enjoy the feedback! Wish more folks dove into it as deeply as you!
So let’s dive a little deeper…
I was thinking more about what I know about social network theory, as well as my own experience analyzing audience demographics while I was the Entrepreneurs Guide at About.com, and wondering if there’s a possibility that your methodology might have led you to A cluster of 19 people with somewhat similar following patterns, but not necessarily THE cluster of 19 people.
I just kept thinking, “small business people” is a huge freaking network, with lots of hubs and lots of clusters. I kept thinking about the fact, for example, that there are some very distinct groups within “small business people”:
- Wannabes (I hate my job, have an idea, I want to start a business, so I’m trying to learn about it)
- Independent newbies (I just started a business — what now?)
- Bootstrappers (those who have tapped into some kind of peer network)
- WAHMs (work-at-home moms running a side business)
- Angel/venture funded startups
- Traditional brick-and-mortar local small business (retail, restaurants, etc.)
I can tell you that absolutely, unequivocally, these are fairly distinct clusters with very different behaviors. They don’t talk to each other much, they don’t read the same online sources, and… they probably don’t follow the same people on Twitter.
So, that leads me to wonder if you might not get very different results if your initial 10 people were all within one of those clusters I identified above. I also have to wonder how different the picture might look with 10 different random people, depending on where they are within the network.
You’re definitely thinking about it the right way… If the initial 10 aren’t in a niche that communicates with each other, then the results do end up skewed towards celebrities, national politicians and/or major news sites. In this case, part of the issue is address by the fact that we started by looking at hundreds of people from the small business community and only stuck with those who were “selective” in who they followed, but if we were to run it on 10 people who were not connected to those 10 in any meaningful way, then we’d very likely get different results.
A very belated thank you for including me on the list! -Sarah
Scott Monty!!!! Ford!!!. Hardly SME’s
Thanks so much for this fantastic list. This is a great tool for ant small business using social media.