I’m on a bit of a Twitter high these days. On the weekend I passed 5000 followers (probably only to drop below the level again once Twitter eliminates some spam-bots), and today two political Twitter league tables have been published. I am the 10th most-followed person in UK think tanks on Twitter, and 5th on Burston Marsteller’s EU list of G20 Twitter influencers.

Both of the tables need to be taken with a pinch of salt though.

I am only an associate fellow of IPPR, essentially a freelancer that they can call upon from time to time, so apart from the odd RT of IPPR’s work and some debates with Will Straw and Nick Pearce I’m not exactly at the heart of think tank comms.

The BM EU table is more interesting because writing about the EU is at the heart of what I do. Tweeting about EU politics has been an extension of the blogging here over the years. But their table uses Klout for scores, and at least two MEPs – Daniel Hannan and Marietje Schaake – score more highly than I do. Perhaps it’s a little tokenism to show that the only people using Twitter with big audiences in EU affairs are not just mainstream media journalists and politicians?

The title of the BM study is also interesting: they talk of influencers. That rather confuses me. I’m engaging people in some sort of dialogue on Twitter, and I am most definitely not strategic about it. I’m not – at least not actively anyway – setting out to influence people (perhaps with the exception of urging people to travel by train rather than fly!)

Anyway, to people publishing studies into this, and to the 5000+ folks following me, I very much appreciate it. Even if I don’t quite know why!