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This paper introduces a method for assessing the influence of Twitter accounts of central e-government agencies. It first stresses the importance of activity and popularity of the e-government accounts, and also the importance of community formation among followers-citizens, as the two main stages of e-government adoption. The proposed approach combines activity and popularity of the accounts and followers' community characteristics in a ranking system, using an idea originally introduced to measure blogosphere authority. A Twitter Authority Index is produced. The method is demonstrated through an extended example: 56 Twitter accounts of ministries of EU countries are sorted according to their indexes in the proposed ranking system. Detailed values for the ministries' accounts and average values for the countries that the ministries belong to are reported and commented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a method for assessing the influence of Twitter accounts of central e-government agencies. It first stresses the importance of activity and popularity of the e-government accounts, and also the importance of community formation among followers-citizens, as the two main stages of e-government adoption. The proposed approach combines activity and popularity of the accounts and followers’ community characteristics in a ranking system, using an idea originally introduced to measure blogosphere authority. A Twitter Authority Index is produced. The method is demonstrated through an extended example: 56 Twitter accounts of ministries of EU countries are sorted according to their indexes in the proposed ranking system. Detailed values for the ministries’ accounts and average values for the countries that the ministries belong to are reported and commented.