There’s a great post here from Andrew Smith here on social media metrics. He crunches link stats from the Guardian Twitter feed to make the point that the number of followers in a network is no measure of influence.

The Guardian Technology Twitter account has 564,698 followers. [….] Click through rates are around the 1,500 mark.

Even with a huge bunch of followers, the click through rates for links put out by Guardiantech on Twitter are around 0.4 per cent or less.

Now and again, a link of mine might generate 150 to 200 click throughs – so as a percentage of my Twitter followers that’s [close to 30 per cent].

Do read Andy’s full post. I’ve sub-edited it heavily. His point is well made. Numbers mean bugger all. Content and relevance are the key measures of authority and influence.