Time Magazine published its annual list of The 100 Most Influential People yesterday, presenting a list with a mix of household names and newly discovered people which you may not have heard of.

The first question I had was: How many of the the 100 go to Twitter when they have something to say? You may remember Fred Wilson’s post back in February, about the The Twitter Contradiction and this list is a compelling test case for his contention that:

Twitter is where people who have something to say go to say it.

The second question I had was: Is there a Twitter List for this list? There is now with the Twitter List we’ve built for this year’s Time 100 class. Go subscribe to easily stay up to date on what this class is talking about.

A quick analysis

With the Twitter List setup, we can use some of the tools we’re building to analyze The Time 100 Twitter profiles.

Out of the 100, 69 of them are on Twitter. That could be debatable with some accounts that may not really be that person. And, similarly, many of the accounts are run by staff, not the person themselves. But, 2/3 presence on Twitter is a pretty good start. 49 of the 69 are currently verified. It appears The Verified account team at Twitter has some work to do today.

On the other hand, you may find it a relief that nearly a third of the Time 100 class of influencers are not on Twitter. Based on this fact, people that are working hard, doing great things but have not jumped into social media can likely feel no obligation to do so.

After exporting into a spreadsheet, we can get some aggregate stats on the group.

Exported List of Time 100’s Twitter Profiles

  • Median Followers: 596,584
  • Median Friends: 348
  • Median Tweets: 3602
  • Median number of Twitter Lists on: 3776

Popularity contest for the popularity contest

It should come as no surprise that entertainers, politicians, journalists and athletes have a significant Twitter presence. The top 10 most followed on this list are:

  1. @BarackObama
  2. @ArianaGrande
  3. @Adele
  4. @NICKIMINAJ
  5. @LeoDiCaprio
  6. @priyankachopra
  7. @azizansari
  8. @TheRock
  9. @Pontifex
  10. @RT_Erdogan

Guo Pei, a Chinese fashion designer has the fewest.

Early Adopter in Chief

President Obama also leads the way as an early adopter, having joined Twitter the earliest of all of those on in the list, back in March 2007 while Human Rights Activist Nadia Murad joined this past December and has the newest Twitter account.

Tweet, Tweet

Ariana Grande’s account is the chattiest of the bunch. But, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Nicki Minaj and Donald Trump have also tweeted over 30,000 times and are not far behind.

Is Tweeting hazardous to your influence or even career?

Here’s a quick rundown of those without a Twitter presence. They tend to fall into a few categories: military/security, foreign government officials, artists and scientists and Twitter competitors. I can imagine that Twitter could be viewed as a security risk in some of these circles. But for artists and scientists, it is interesting to see them opt-out, are they focused on their work more than others?

Shelley Hwang
Dan Carder
Marc Edwards
Kathy Niakan
Kip Thorne
Yuri Milner
Mohammed bin Nayef
Wang Jianlin
Kathleen Kennedy
Priscilla Chan
Mark Zuckerberg
Elena Ferrante
Ryan Coogler
Oscar Isaac
Mark Rylance
Yayoi Kusama
Kim Jong Un
Diana Natalicio
Lori Robinson
Queen Máxima
James Comey
Raghuram Rajan
Sergio Moro
Xi Jinping
Tsai Ing-wen
Sean MacFarland
Jin Liqun
Angela Merkel
Marilynne Robinson
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Tu Youyou

Most likely to follow you

These Influential people have the highest follow-back ratio, so if you’d like to connect on Twitter with one, these are your best chances:

  1. @AgenziaH
  2. @RidingShotgunLA
  3. @rajpanjabi
  4. @JahaENDFGM
  5. @LeeRberger

On the other side, there’s very little chance of @azizansari following you since the “Pasta Lover” currently follows 0 people.

About those Twitter Lists

Ironically, looking back at the Twitter Lists launch, Time was mentioned in the lead of the post. Twitter Lists have long been one of those features that many Twitter fans love and find incredibly useful, yet Twitter invests very little in the lists feature.

If you like lists, Twitter or otherwise, and doing this type of scouting and analysis is of interest, we invite you to sign up for ScoutZen and help build the future of list building.