Since the introduction of Lists in Twitter, there has been some speculation about how Twitter Lists could help indicate Influence. See the following for some background:

• Using Twitter Lists to Judge Influence


• How Twitter Lists Influence…Influence


• Twitter Lists: What Is Your Respect Ratio?


• Twitter Lists to Followers Ratio: The New Social Media Metric

It is clear that interest focuses on the ratio of your Lists to Followers.

I decided to assess whether this new metric correlates in any way to existing influence measurement tools. The objective was to assess whether the metric has any correlation with influence ranking algorithms that do not use Lists information. For my experiment, I considered influence measurement tools like Twinfluence, Twitalyzer, and Klout.

Not for casual users. There can be important implications for serious users. Since the advent of Twitter, the number of followers has been considered to be a rough indicator of influence. As a result, very few have taken pains to actually filter their followers and weed out spammers