Each year, ZN brings together communicators, policymakers, and social media influencers to share insights, tips, and tactics, and to discuss the challenges and opportunities of digital. What’s more, this gathering is also about crowning the top EU online influencers across 12 key topics.
The event took place on September 2020. Because of the coronavirus, the event was hybrid, meaning that ZN’s CEO Philip Weiss, Senior Director & Hypermoderator Liora Kern and our technical team were at the office in person while panellists and participants joined online.
As in years past, ZN presented the #EUinfluencer ranking and organised a debate to discuss today’s most important topics, such as:
- How has Covid-19 transformed digital influence in the last 6 months?
- What roles do influencers play in protest movements such as BlackLivesMatter?
- Is the EU Commission ready for a digital world?
- How important are online influencers in the Brussels Bubble—do they matter?
This year, Philip and Liora presented the methodology of the ranking and moderated the discussion, which featured prominent online influencers, journalists, and thinkers such as Pia Ahrenkilde, Pablo Perez, Jennifer Baker, Marco Ricorda, Paul Nemitz, Alice Stollmeyer, Jon Worth, Lili Bayer, and Kriticos.
New this year: Although we ranked the top 40 EU Influencers, what is different from last year is that we included two additional categories—Covid-19 and Space!
So, let’s jump right into the ranking. ZN is proud to present this year’s EU Influencers!
Methodology
We created two rankings:
- Top influencers in twelve categories (step 1 & 2)
- Top 40 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 twelve categories related to European Union affairs:
- Politics
- Economy
- Agriculture
- Transport
- Energy
- Food & Drink
- Healthcare
- Sustainability & environment
- Migration & Human Rights
- Technology
- COVID-19
- Space
We then created queries that would allow multilingual responses and would 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-40
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 (total retweets divided by the number of tweets)
- Density of followers in Brussels (the number of followers of the influencer in Brussels divided by his or her number of followers)
- NEW THIS YEAR: Number of MEP followers
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-40 #EUINFLUENCER LIST
Et voila! This is how we created our #EUinfluencer top-40 list. Using our own unique formula and years of experience in target and influencer mappings.
Contact us for more information.