Here they are! The top EU influencers of 2021. It is a great mix of personalities and again, we have a non-English tweeting winner: ZDF-correspondent Stefan Leifert.
Please share the lists on social media and let us know your thoughts.
Methodology
We created two rankings:
- Top influencers in ten categories (step 1 & 2)
- Top 50 influencers overall (step 3, 4 & 5)
TOP influencers per category
STEP 1: FINDING INFLUENCERS
We used social media monitoring tools to find users tweeting about eleven categories related to EU affairs:
- EU Politics
- Economy & trade
- Agriculture
- Transport
- Energy
- Food & Drink
- Healthcare & COVID19
- Sustainability & environment
- Human Rights
- Technology
- Space
We then created queries that would allow multilingual responses and focus our results on Brussels influencers.
STEP 2: TOP INFLUENCERS PER CATEGORY
We retrieved the number of tweets about each category for the last year[1], the name of the user and their number of followers. With this data, we built a graph for each of the categories, looking at different factors.
With this methodology we then classified influencers per interest, potential reach, number of tweets and followers.
From there, we gathered the top users from “high interest, high potential reach” of each category and they were ordered by followers and number of mentions to decide the top-3 of each category[2].
#EUinfluencer top-50
STEP 3: CREATION OF THE TOP-100 #EUINFLUENCER LIST
We gathered around 100 influencers who were the top influencers of each category, considering the following KPIs:
- Number of followers
- Average retweets per tweet (the average number of retweets the influencer gets per tweet)
- Density of followers in Brussels (the number of followers of the influencer in Brussels divided by his or her number of followers. Estimated number)
- NEW THIS YEAR: Number of MEP that have mentioned the influencer last year.
STEP 4: CRITERIA FOR INCLUSION – EXCLUSION
We established criteria for inclusion and exclusion from the list:
- Only individuals included, no companies and/or association accounts
- MEPs, Commissioners and top Commission and Parliament workers excluded
STEP 5: ESTABLISH TOP-50 #EUINFLUENCER LIST
Et voila! This is how we created our #EUinfluencer top-50 list. Using our own unique formula and years of experience in target and influencer mappings.
Contact us for your own target and influencer mapping, or anything else related to digital.
[1] 1 July, 2020 to 15 July 2021
[2] https://znconsulting.com/articles/euinfluencer-2020-how-covid-19-has-changed-influence/
https://znconsulting.com/articles/euinfluencer-2020-communicating-the-eu/
https://znconsulting.com/articles/euinfluencer-2020-in-tweets/
