A lot of people are trying to integrate Twitter into their marketing efforts or political campaigns. But the question arises, what is the best strategy for using Twitter to influence people to buy your product or service, or vote for your candidate? The conventional wisdom about Twitter has been that the more followers a person has, the greater that person’s influence. This belief has been so entrenched that some companies reportedly pay $5,000 to $10,000 to people with large followings (50,000 followers or more) for each tweet that contains a link to the advertiser’s website (pay-per-tweet). But now there’s a new study that says a large following does not equate to large influence. Meeyoung Cha headed a team at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems that studied 2 billion follow links among the 54 million Twitter users (“Tweeple” in Twitter parlance). The result is a study called “The Million Follower Fallacy.” [Read more...]