Social Media: a new study shows that a popular boy band is the most influential tweeter in UK

Every single member of the boyband One Direction are considered more influential in the UK than the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London and a number of other high-profile politicians and journalists, according to a new Twitter index.

Liam Payne, Harry Styles, Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson each scored 98 out of a possible 100 in terms of influence, with Zayn Malik in fifth place on 97.

The scores are calculated based on how much other Twitter users retweet and engage with the tweeter and isn’t based purely on how many followers they have.

Prime Minister David Cameron, for example, scored the same amount of points as Zayn Malik but has fewer than 500k followers, compared to the 3 million or more of Piers Morgan behind him in eighth place.

The rest of the top 10 is made up of musician Ed Sheeran, columnist Caitlin Moran and comedian Ricky Gervais.

PeerIndex studied over 10 billion tweets from 150 million people to compile the Twitter 140.

For the ratings, Peerindex focused on whether other people in the UK were responding to, retweeting or engaging with a tweeter.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2483373/One-Direction-tops-Twitter-list-UKs-influential-users--David-Cameron-lagging-7th-place.html#ixzz2jbRH6Tr2