The Top 100 People To Follow On Twitter For Financial News

A couple of days ago we posted Mapping the Financial / Media Twittersphere, an illustration of the Twitter accounts that are most central for financial news.

A network centrality analysis, ie finding the people who have the most followers and the most influential followers, is a good starting point if you want to find the stories that are generating the most traction in social media and in the markets.

But there are things network centrality doesn't pick up:

• Relevance: The @BarackObama issue. There are accounts that are really widely followed but rarely share anything of significance to financial markets. It's also a bit of a @sullydish or @finansakrobat problem, there are accounts that are no longer very active or relevant but still widely followed. For StreetEYE, what people click on, upvote, and retweet is what's relevant. You want to follow the people who tweet that stuff.
• Non-curators: The @business issue. The core media accounts like Bloomberg and WSJ accounts are really widely followed and relevant, but they really don't filter much, they just tweet everything that goes out on the service. There are some accounts that are awesome and relevant, and widely followed, but they only tweet their own stuff, for relevant stuff by people outside their own services. Relevant, but not much of a signal.
• Timeliness:< You want people who tweet the relevant stuff quickly, not after it went viral.
• Information rate: You want people who tweet often, and have a high signal to noise ratio.

Find some great 'curators' who generate a signal-rich stream. See what people click on and upvote. Find more people who generate a stream that's similar, and make a stream that's a little quicker, broader, and richer. The StreetEYE community benefits from that virtuous cycle.

Without further ado, here's a map of who we think are the best curators on Twitter. (It's algorithmic, but then the choice of algorithms and inputs is subjective.)

The map sorts accounts that are similar/connected. The widely/broadly followed are in the middle, you have a huge chunk of Fed/official related accounts up top, econ types are on the right, a bunch of euro/macro/FX types more toward the top, some tech on the bottom, the pure stock pickers on the left.

Below is the list of the top 100 accounts, ranked using our relevance algorithm, and then the pure centrality rank. You can follow the top 50, updated on a regular basis on the StreetEYE Twitter leaderboard. For a broader list mapped and sorted just by centrality, including all those core financial media accounts, see our previous post.

Please let us know what you think!