The 50 Most Influential NASCAR Twitter Accounts: September 2011 Edition

Have you heard? Judging social media success strictly by Twitter follower numbers is soooo last year.

What matters the most now is social media influence. In other words: How does a person use their Twitter and Facebook accounts to prompt their audience to take action?

“Taking action” can have a variety of different meanings: Replying back with a comment, clicking on a link to an article/photo or re-tweeting the message to their friends.

The best site to judge social media influence is Klout.com. So we decided to run every NASCAR-related tweeter (that’s drivers, driver wives and girlfriends and race team personnel like crew chiefs or spotters) and see which ones were the most influential with their Twitter accounts.

Frankly, some of the results after the top few drivers were quite surprising.

Left out of the top 50 in Klout influence were drivers with big follower numbers like Bobby Labonte (18th overall in follower count), Greg Biffle (20th) and Robby Gordon (25th).

Others completely overachieved, such as Matt Kenseth (ninth in influence but only 31st in total followers), Andy Lally (20th-most influential but 69th in follower count) and Parker Kligerman (40th/70th).

Probably the most stunning result was that of Dana Wilson, who is known as @mrscrewchief on Twitter. The wife of crew chief Shane Wilson has less than 2,000 followers and ranks 111th in the total followers category. But Wilson is rated as more influential than people like Landon Cassill and Steve Wallace, who fell short of the top 50 in Klout score.

A note about the list below: Each person is ranked by overall Klout score, which is rounded to the nearest whole number; the “overall” column represents the rank in total followers (as in the past, media and public relations accounts are not included).