The good folks at Captain Economics did a great post a couple of weeks back on 'The Economics Twitosphere Top 100 Influential Users'.
We followed up with our own post, Mapping the Financial / Media Twittersphere, an illustration of the Twitter accounts that are most central for financial news.
A network centrality analysis, i.e. finding the people who have the most followers and the most influential followers, is a good starting point if you want to find the stories that are generating the most traction in social media and in the markets.
Relevance: The @BarackObama issue. There are accounts that are really widely followed but rarely share anything of significance to financial markets. It's also a bit of a @sullydish or @finansakrobat problem, there are accounts that are no longer very active or relevant but still widely followed. For StreetEYE, what people click on, upvote, and retweet is what's relevant. We want to follow the people who tweet that stuff.
Non-curators: The @business issue. The core media accounts like @nytimes, @TheEconomist, @WSJ, @FT, @business and @reuters accounts are really widely followed and relevant, but they really don't filter much, they just tweet everything that goes out on the wire. There are some accounts that are awesome and relevant, and widely followed, but they only tweet their own stuff. They don't 'curate' relevant stuff by people outside their own services. Relevant, but not much of a signal as to what's really important.
Timeliness: You want people who tweet the relevant stuff early in the propagation cycle, not after everybody's seen it.
Information rate: You want people who tweet often, and have a high signal to noise ratio.
The map sorts accounts that are similar/connected. The widely/broadly followed are in the middle, you have a huge chunk of Fed/official related accounts up top, econ types are on the right, a bunch of euro/macro/FX types more toward the top, some Asia/China accounts toward bottom left, some tech on the bottom, the pure stock pickers on the left.
Below is the list of the top 100 accounts, ranked using our relevance algorithm, and then the pure centrality score. You can follow the top 50, updated on a regular basis on the StreetEYE Twitter leaderboard. For a broader list mapped and sorted just by centrality, including all those core financial media accounts, see our previous post.