A study by a leading digital marketing firm in the world, Pinstorm, has ranked His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the most influential person for online Indians ahead of movie star Amitabh Bachchan, cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar and billionaire Vijay Mallya.
The list of top ‘India Influencers’, as Pinstorm calls it, was brought out after tracking about 1,500 Indian identities online every single day over the last few months.
The Pinstorm IndiaInfluencer list uses two internationally recognised tools: Klout and PeerIndex to measure the influence of an individual. Each of these tools does a complex set of measurements and calculations of someone’s online activity assessing attributes like an individual’s social reach, authority, amplification and activity.
Commending the team behind His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s online activities, Pinstorm on its website said that the Tibetan spiritual leader “astounds us by being undisputed No. 1 in India with an amazing eight point lead over the only-slightly-less-surprising No. 2, Salman Khan”.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has a combined online following of nearly 4 million people the world over through his Twitter and Facebook accounts. His latest tweet, “Meet hostility and suspicion with kindness. Helping others out of love is always the best option” reached a whopping 2.1 million people and the list continues to grow.
India has over 100 million internet users with more than three crore Indians active on Facebook and 80 lakhs tweeting. According to technology and market research firm Forrester Research, India will be the third largest internet user base by 2013 – with China and the US taking the first two spots, respectively.
Top 10 influencers
1. Dalai Lama (DalaiLama)
2. Salman Khan (BeingSalmanKhan)
3. Hrithik Roshan (iHrithik)
4. Siddharth (Actor_Siddharth)
5. Ram Gopal Verma (RGVzoomin)
6. Farhan Akhtar (FarOutAkhtar)
7. Preity Zinta (realpreityzinta)
8. Uday Chopra (udaychopra)
9. Akshay Kumar (akshaykumar)
10. Aamir Khan (aamir_khan)
