Most Influential Data Science Accounts on Twitter

The Data Science Influencers: The Tops in Terms of "Insider Score" According to Influence Mapping Tool LittleBird

The 123 Heaviest Influencers in Data Science

Data Science is a hot sector. Like most geeky memes, the hot-bed of social media is on Twitter. Loads of companies are launching in the space. But who are the real influencers? And how do they behave on Twitter? We turned to Marshall Kirkpatrick's influencer mapping and marketing tool LittleBird to pull in a list and do some analysis. It's getting rave reviews as a way to gain insights into influencers in networks that are not obvious from simple Twitter counts.

Unlike simple follower counts, LittleBird builds a true influencer network map by measuring how often influencers retweet other influencers and the density of network activity. This goes into what they call their "Influencer Score." It's not a perfect methodology but its relatively solid as a way of assigning contextual relevance values and true influencer status rather than just counting Tweets.

To set LittleBird up to run an influencer graph for your topic, you need to feed it a handful of accounts you know are influencers in the area you are focused on. We put in six Twitter handles that we knew were serious influencers (including Hilary Mason, KDNuggets and DataScienceCentral) and then set LittleBird to work doing the network analysis and metrics. LittleBird spat back 123 influencers from all over the world.* It was a fabulous list with tons of room for interesting analysis. So let's do it.