My last blog post mentioned online influence. I explained that your influence offline vs. online doesn’t always transcend and cited an example of Bill Gates tweeting vs. the power that Ryan Seacrest has online. So it got me to thinking, why not compare recent tweets between Gates vs. Seacrest to see who really has “pull” online. Who would really win? The results were surprising and not what I had guessed.

(BTW, I never thought I’d ever write the phrase in a blog post, “Gates vs. Seacrest” …which come to think of it- would make for an awesome pay-per-view boxing fight).

In this unscientific comparison for online influence, I first wanted to establish and compare # of followers:

Bill Gates has 477,645 followers.
Ryan Seacrest has 2,952,473 followers.

As you can see, by measurement of pure followers, Seacrest easily overpowers Gates by 2,474,828 followers. You could say based on these numbers, the perceived reach and influence is much greater for Ryan Seacrest.

Measurement Methodology
My next step was to reviewed both Twitter streams to find a Tweet, older than 7 days, with a bit.ly URL, paired with verbiage from Gates or Seacrest that was along the lines of “i created this, and I want you to check it out by clicking the bit.ly link”. My intent was to find an older Tweet that isn’t active (so the numbers are fairly static), and the Tweet must be persuasive with a clear please “click my link” call-to-action.

Bill Gates:

Ryan Seacrest:

Initial thoughts: case closed?

Seacrest had 15,181 more click-throughs than Gates. My point is proven! Right? Bill Gates who arguably has more influence offline than Ryan Seacrest, has less infleunce online. Case closed?

This was the first comparison of many. When I performed other comparisons of bit.ly URLs between the two, the results were much different…

Bill Gates:

Ryan Seacrest:

What’s going on here?

The more links I tested and compared, I noticed that even with Ryan Seacrest’s 2,474,828 more followers …his click-through numbers weren’t that much more significant than Bill Gates (who has only 400,000+ followers). Most of the link comparisons placed them fairly comparable in terms of numbers.

• Does this mean followers counts don’t matter? (some people say to ignore #followers)
• What’s the right messaging/ communication for a conversion click?
• Does the time of day matter in which these tweets are being sent?
• Is there be a better “quality” or high signal to noise ratio for Gate’s followers?

What’s your opinion? What are your thoughts on online influence? What’s going on here between Gates and Seacrest? Make a comment.
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