# A Method for Assessing the Performance of e-Government Twitter Accounts
## 2 Measuring Influence in Twitter  
_\"One American in ten tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy. They are the Influentials. They aren't the richest 10 percent or the best educated 10 percent. They aren't the early adopters who are always the first to try everything. They are, however, the 10 percent of Americans most engaged in their communities\"_ claimed [PERSON] and [PERSON] [24]. [PERSON] _et al._[25] mentioned that the \"influencers\" exhibit some combination of desirable attributes that allows them to influence a disproportionately large number of others. Thus, an emerging question is what influence is and what defines an Influential? Social influence _\"describes the phenomenon by which the behavior of an individual can directly or indirectly affect the thoughts, feelings and actions of others in a population\"_[26; 27]. The fluidity of environments, the variations of platforms and the evolving behaviors of users online make difficult the attempts to define the concept of influence on social media [18]. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [28] stated that social influence _\"occurs when an individual's thoughts or actions are affected by other people\"_ and [PERSON] _et al._[18] took into consideration that, in Twitter communities, two actions intrinsic to the system can occur: the reply and the retweet, so they defined _\"influence on Twitter as the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user\"_. One popular metric of influence on Twitter is number of a user's followers. This metric implies that the more followers a user has, the more impact the user has, as the user seems to be more popular [18]. However this metric focuses on Twitter as a broadcast medium and ignores the potential for users' interactions. Taking this into consideration, [PERSON] _et al._[18] claimed that influence on Twitter depends on the fundamental structure of ideas in the environment and how these ideas move. Thus, they used the actions of a user, tweets-replies-retweets, to measure influence. An account has three different types of influence [19]: (1) in-degree influence, the number of followers of a user, directly indicates the size of the audience for that user; (2) retweet influence, which indicates the ability of that user to generate content; and (3) mention influence, which indicates the ability of that user to engage others in a conversation. The authors compared the three different measures of influence and found that the most followed users did not necessarily score highest on the other measures [19]. The three types of influence [19] will later be taken into account in the analysis of this paper. [PERSON] _et al._[20] also compared three different measures of influence: (1) number of followers (2) page-rank; and (3) number of retweets--finding that the ranking of the most influential users differed, depending on the measure. Rankings based on retweets differ and do not necessarily correlate with user's social status. According to their findings, retweeting plays an important role in the diffusion of information in the network, as no matter how many followers a user has, any tweet being retweeted is likely to reach an average of 1000 users. [PERSON] _et al._[29] also used re-tweets (amplified tweets) and the number of tweets authored by each participant of the 2013 Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine Twitter community, to investigate if experienced individuals are also the most influential members. They developed a multivariate linear regression model to identify any relationship to social media influence, measured by the PageRank. According to their findings, any participant who was able to author the greatest number of tweets or have more of his/her tweets amplified could yield a greater influence on the participants, regardless of his/her authority. A different approach undertaken by [PERSON] [30], as an alternative method for ranking Twitter users, takes into consideration the number of others that a user follows. Two types of users exist.