In a revealing article from the New York Times over the weekend, our own Ryan Seacrest was named the fifth most influential person on Twitter. The article highlights the difference between having a large following on the micro-blogging social network, and having a large influence. According to the company who conducted the research, the five most followed people on Twitter aren’t the five most influential as one would assume. Take a peek at the article by columnist David Leonhardt:

“So who are the most influential people on Twitter? We asked the people at Twitalyzer, an independent research firm, to study the question, and they came back with something called the Influence Index. It counts the number of times somebody’s Twitter name is mentioned by other users (including retweets, which occur when one user rebroadcasts another’s message). The Influence Index doesn’t merely measure who’s talking on Twitter, but it also measures how much someone is affecting the conversation.”

Read the full article here and check out the list of the top 10 influencers below!