A new study suggests that widely accepted Twitter strategies may be misguided. The report, Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy, rejects what it calls the “modern view” flows according to interpersonal connections among ordinary users, and the general marketing willingness of a community to accept an innovation. Rather, it seems that information cascades down from influential figures, in a “traditional” manner.

Objectively measuring influence has never been easier, because of the vast amount of data available on sites like Twitter. The researchers identified three categories of influence, and identified lists of the 20 ‘most influential’ users in each. The first is the number of followers, which indicates popularity.

The most followed figures are a mix of celebrities, politicians and news sources. The second is the number of retweets, which are a judgment on the content value of a tweet. The highest ranked in this category were content aggregation sites like Mashable as well as news sources and businessmen. The third kind was the number of mentions, which show the name value of a particular user. Celebrities are the most mentioned people on Twitter, with the researchers noting the “great passion” with which users gossiped about their favorites. Perhaps surprisingly, the top 20 and indeed top 100 lists had little overlap between the three categories, showing that they indicate different kinds of influence. The researchers wanted to see whether influence is transferable across topics.

The researchers measured the numbers of retweets and mentions popular users generated across three popular 2009 topics – swine flu, the death of Michael Jackson and the protests following the elections in Iran. They found that users in their top 20 lists were able to influence opinion across all three topics, despite having no particular expertise on any of them. So, influential people can influence others on topics outside of their area of influence. No surprise there.

Interestingly, the study also looked at how ordinary users increased their influence. As it turns out, users tweeting regularly but not too frequently on a single topic made the biggest gains in influence over the eight months of the study. Users looking to build a loyal base of followers and expand their influence should take a similarly focused approach.

Above all, the study shows that when it comes to social media, most of us are still at the beginning of our learning – even the more mature adopters. But when you do need some more experienced heads many of our 12,500 creatives are leading the way in social media use for companies so why not submit a brief now.