The 100 Most Influential Arabs on Twitter

[Al Bhatti]

January 24, 2012

Twitter is one of the hottest social networks around, a place where you go to engage with thought leaders, top officials and celebrities. I once read that “Facebook is for people you went to school with. Twitter is for people you wish you went to school with.”

Twitter now has over 300 million people tweeting 250 million tweets per day. There are 652,33 Active Twitter users (who tweet at least once a month) in the greater Middle East, according to the 3rd Arab Social Media Report.

Arabic accounts for 1.2% of all public tweets, and Arabic tweets have grown in volume over the past year at a staggering rate of 2,146%, according to Paris-based firm Semiocast, as The Next Web reports.

When it comes to influence, Twitter lists have been generated to measure who has the highest number of followers, but is the number of followers an indication? Or there are other measurements?

Klout is one website that claims to accurately measure a person’s online influence, using 35 different variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure “true reach,” which is the size of your engaged audience, based on the number of followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages.

It also measures “amplification score,” which is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments).

Another metric is your “network score,” which indicates how influential your engaged audience and gives users a total score out of 100. This algorithm uses data points that include your followers, re-tweets, list memberships, your engagement with other users, their influence, mentions, and whether accounts that follow you are just spam accounts.

Klout also deducts points if you are absent from Twitter or Facebook, so it is a decent indication of how active you are online.

There have been few attempts to list top Arabs on Twitter, but often these lists only ranked users by the number of followers. While this is one way to look at it, I think it should be based on multiple variables that measure online influence, a bit closer to what Klout is doing.

So I put together a list of the Most Influential Arabs on Twitter according to their Klout score.

This is how I compiled the list:

I used websites like tweet.grader.com to find the top 50 Twitter users in the major Arab countries.

I also collected the top Twitter users http://mtwtron.com/top_users.

I then took only those users who have a score of 59 and up, and took the top 100 scores descending from 100 down. Bear in mind that while this list was compiled on Saturday, January 21st, 2012, it’s an evolving entity, as these scores are variables. So it could fluctuate according to a given user's level of engagement.

(If your Klout score is 59 and up please let me know so I can add you to my broader list: https://twitter.com/#!/Shusmo/top-arab-influencers/members.)

You can dowload the entire pdf on Wamda here or view the list below.

Here are some statistics about the list:

38% of the Top Tweeps are from KSA. Egypt comes in second with 30%.

The media sector is the dominant profession for the Top tweeps with 62%, While politics came in second at 16%.

The majority of Top Tweeps are male, while only 14% of the total list of 100 were female.

Khaled Elahmad is a Social Media Instructor in the Middle East. He can be found on Twitter @shusmo.

The 100 Most Influential Arabs on Twitter | Wamda.com

 

[Al Bhatti]

Jan 26, 2012

Dubai Ruler on new list of most influential Arabs on Twitter

The Ruler of Dubai and the Foreign Minister are among six people from the UAE who appear on a new list of the 100 most influential Arabs on Twitter.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid is 30th on the list. The Prime Minister and Vice President has tweeted as HHShkMohd since June 2009, and on the date the list was compiled he had 638,921 followers. He recently posted photos of himself donating blood.

Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, is 16th. He uses the handle ABZayed to tweet in Arabic and had gathered 85,919 followers since signing up to Twitter just three months before the list was compiled.

Sultan Al Qassemi, the columnist and commentator on Arab affairs who tweets as SultanAlQassemi, had 93,797 followers. He is ranked 22nd.

The other UAE-based Twitter users - or "tweeps" - on the list are the MBC sports presenter and newspaper columnist Mustafa Agha (Mustafa_Agha, 78,124, 25th), the Abu Dhabi Sports TV commentator Faris Awad (farisf9, 187,810, 28th), and the sports broadcaster Khaled Al Shenaif (k_alshenaif, 96,268, 49th).

The list was compiled by Khaled El Ahmad, a social media instructor from Jordan, and has just been published on Wamda, a website for entrepreneurs.

Mr El Ahmad rejected the idea of simply basing the rankings on the number of followers each user had. Instead he used scores produced by the Klout website, which takes into account 35 variables to rate a person’s online influence. The list is based on data collected on January 21.

The FNC member and keen Twitter user Noura Al Kaabi welcomed the embracing of the micro-blogging site by leaders such as Sheikh Mohammed and Sheikh Abdullah.

“It’s definitely a good thing, as we all know Twitter is an important way to connect with people,” she said. “It’s really important to feel that you are connected to the leadership. Twitter is like a personal connection: we know the news, we know their views on what’s happening and it’s just an important communication tool.

“Having them included in the list of most influential people is of course normal because you will have more followers who will like to know what’s going on and the views of the leadership.”

She said she would like to see every minister and member of the FNC on Twitter. “It’s crucial. Ministers can start interacting with people and at the end of the day it’s a social responsibility.”

The top six spots in the list are all occupied by Saudi Arabians, with the Muslim scholar Salman Alodah at No 1. He has 647,690 followers and runs his own website, Islam Today.

A surprise entry is the US president, Barack Obama, who made it to the list because of a parody account, ArabicObama. The account, which has no links to the US administration, took 18th spot with 151,387 followers.

The other 99 listed are all from the Arab world. Saudi Arabia, with 38 per cent of the top tweeps, has the largest share, followed by Egypt with 30 per cent and Kuwait with 13 per cent. The UAE is fourth.

Media is the most common profession among those listed, accounting for 32 per cent of the total, followed by politics at 16 per cent, religion at 10 per cent and royalty at 5 per cent. Men outnumbered women by 86 per cent to 14.

The list has inevitably received a lot of attention on Twitter. EssJay_Bee summed up that those listed were “typically male, media workers from Saudi Arabia & Egypt”, while Mo Elzubeir of Dubai dismissed the findings as “meaningless”.

Shireen Abdelhadi tweeted: “Interesting the gender breakdown of Twitter usage is 86% male ‘n only 14% women! Now we knw wat they r doing at their jobs.”

Dubai Ruler on new list of most influential Arabs on Twitter - The National