And the most influential genealogist is....

Did you even know there was a ranking such as this? There is, at least on Twitter anyway.

Last week I wrote about the international aspect of Twitter and how much of the world's genealogists can be found there.

I had said "Unfortunately, there is no way to calculate just how many people view an individual tweet."  That's not completely true (for many different reasons). There is a website that follows and measures activity on Twitter.  It's called WeFollow.

WeFollow has two types of rankings - most influential and most followers.  You can check the rankings for any topic that is designated by a tag (ex. #genealogy).


So who is the most influential genealogist on Twitter according to WeFollow? 

Drum roll please.  It is Geneabloggers by Thomas MacEntee.  The rest of the top 10 include (in order) Megan Smolenyak, Footnote Maven, Family Tree Magazine, Roots Television, Steve Nickle, Randy Seaver, Mark Tucker, World Vital Records and Michael Hait.

But....a few qualifications of the supposed rankings are in order.  I should mention that I found no explanation about how they calculated their rankings on the WeFollow website (if anyone knows where I can get that please let me know).

My take is that the WeFollow rankings are calculated STRICTLY on WeFollow subscribers.  I base this on the fact that I was not included on the list before I joined.  So in order to be included in the rankings a Twitter user must have joined WeFollow.

Secondly, I'm presume the rankings are based on a combination of total tweet, total re-tweets and total number of followers.

Also, I can only imagine that time must factor into this somehow.  A new WeFollow member would hardly jump to number one the first day.  Does that follow that the longer one has been subscribed, the higher their rankings will be?  There is probably a threshold level when the time element fades.

There you have it - the top 10 most influential genealogists on Twitter.  What do you think?