Who are the top twitter users in India? Oh well, this question invites noise, as it assumes that the more you tweet, the more you move up in the rank. A good question to ask is who are the most relevant twitter users in India – i.e. people who share a lot of interesting articles and carry engaging discussions.
Infact, yesterday’s Bhagat Singh twitter trending story (* ) reminds one of not trusting the regular media/gurus channel blindly and instead rely on those who consistently share useful articles (i.e. do fact check).
Peerindex is a service that ranks your social impact on various platforms, by looking at your activity on these networks (e.g. Twitter) and specifically how other people respond to the things you say.
The ranking service essentially looks at three broad criteria
- Authority: how well does a person resonate with their audience, and the world at large? How likely are they to say or share things other people will find interesting? Specifically Peerindex looks at content you share and whether other people act on it. The service also looks at the nature of the content (for example – whether it is about finance or sports; or whether it is about music or technology)
- Audience: how large is a persons audience? How engaged?
- Activity: how active is a person in order to drive the resonance and audience? (It helps to be active but not so active as to be a noisy, verbose spammer).
These factors are weighted and provide an apples-for-apples score of 1 to 100, where 100 is God-like and 1 is more normal. (The median score is 19). 
The service looked at several thousand Indian twitter users and here is the top 50.
| Rank | Name | PeerIndex |
| 1 | Mahendra Palsule | 66 |
| 2 | poojakashayp | 64 |
| 3 | nikhil kumar verma | 63 |
| 4 | Karthik Srinivasan | 62 |
| 4 | Gautam Ghosh | 62 |
| 6 | Manan Kakkar | 61 |
| 6 | pjain | 61 |
| 6 | Rohan Joshi | 61 |
| 9 | Venkat Ananth | 60 |
| 9 | Hemant Mehta | 60 |
| 9 | Nitin Pai | 60 |
| 12 | Sidin Vadukut | 59 |
| 12 | Offstumped | 59 |
| 12 | pragmatic_desi | 59 |
| 15 | Malini Nair | 58 |
| 15 | Binoy xavier joy | 58 |
| 15 | Sudhamshu Hebbar | 58 |
| 15 | Peter Sebastian | 58 |
| 15 | gautam | 58 |
| 20 | Harsh Agrawal | 57 |
| 20 | Amit Paranjape | 57 |
| 20 | Rajeev Mantri | 57 |
| 20 | FAKEER ISHAVARDAS | 57 |
| 24 | Vasudev | 56 |
| 24 | Gaurav Mishra | 56 |
| 24 | Kiran Kumar S | 56 |
| 27 | Nikhil Narayanan | 55 |
| 28 | Venkatesh K | 54 |
| 28 | Money Munot | 54 |
| 28 | pluGGd.in | 54 |
| 28 | Amit Agarwal | 54 |
| 33 | Ramesh Srivats | 53 |
| 33 | Sunil Abraham | 53 |
| 33 | Prasanna | 53 |
| 36 | pervin.sanghvi | 52 |
| 37 | Vijay Sankaran | 51 |
| 37 | Prem Piyush Goyal | 51 |
| 37 | Achyut Menon | 51 |
| 37 | Arun Rajagopal | 51 |
| 41 | Arpit Kumar | 50 |
| 41 | additiyom | 50 |
| 41 | Gautam John | 50 |
| 41 | barkha dutt | 50 |
| 45 | Sriram Vadlamani | 49 |
| 45 | Laghu Sikarwar | 49 |
| 45 | Jairaj P | 49 |
| 45 | Mahesh Murthy | 49 |
| 45 | Rawc | 49 |
| 50 | rajeev srinivasan | 48 |
Pluggd.in stands at #28 (do follow Pluggd.in on Twitter).
Few Interesting observations:
- Mahendra Palsule, editor of TechMeme, has the highest PeerIndex – this probably reflects his strong relationships with global authorities in the tech scene. He is frequently in discussion with real global titans like Om Malik (PeerIndex 95 — one of the highest) and Michael Arrington or Louis Gray – this improves his rank.
- Someone like nikhil kumar verma (@inkv) is less known but has a commendable PeerIndex. This demonstrates a very effective use of Twitter for engaging his network.
Of the top 100 twitter users in India by followers: @bdutt scores highest with a PeerIndex of 50. This suggests that, while active on twitter, she is not having the level of impact she could have. Specifically, while engaging with her audience in discussion she doesn’t generate as high a proportion of retweets or sharing of information as some users with smaller audiences — which is a lost opportunity.
What’s your take on this ranking? The good part is that this ranking result comes at the right time – i.e. Bhagat Singh controversy clearly demonstrates the fact that you need to know whom to follow, based on their credibility (and not noise generation skills or association with a big brand).
* – Bhagat Singh Twitter Controversy
On Feb 14th, IBN Editor tweeted this
” On 14.2.1931, Lahore, in morning time the legendary BHAGAT SINGH, RAJGURU & SUKHDEV were hanged..Happy Valen.. Day”
This was retweeted by the sensational loving twitteratis and even the Wikipedia page was changed mentioning the wrong date [Bhagat Singh was hanged on March 23rd, not Feb 14th]. Bhagat Singh was a trending topic yesterday, and sadly there was no fact check by people (just a case of RT madness).
Recommended Market Survey: Twitter in India – People Use it as a News Service [Survey Report]
