Diver Tom Daley wins an early gold ahead of his 11th August 10m diving final, as the most influential British Olympian on Twitter, with a score of 91, ahead of gold-medallists, Greg Rutherford in 2nd with 84.7 and Jessica Ennis in 7th with 80.8.

The TweetLevel top 10 current British Olympians (full list here):

As of midnight 10th August 2012

As well as the most influential, Tom Daley also has the largest Twitter following,(1.2 million followers) amongst the British Olympians. However, it’s not Daley’s number of Twitter of followers that places him in first place but his continual engagement with regular tweets, retweets and replies that drives his influence. Female footballer, Stephanie Houghton follower count lies at only 23,162, relatively small compare to her fellow Olympians, Rebecca Adlington (269,768) and Kerri-Anne Payne (38,022), but she places 6th in the TweetLevel table. Similarly, tennis player Andrew Murray well exceeds the one million mark in followers but only lies in 20th position.

Jonny Bentwood, Global Head of Analyst and Influential Engagement said “athletes understand the value of being active, more than anyone. Engaging with your followers, and generating RT’s and much more important factors than the number of followers when it comes to measuring influence on Twitter. The Olympians that appear at the top of the TweetLevel list are the most active and engaged Twitter users.”

The research conducted using Edelman’s TweetLevel ranking system scores the Twitter influence of individuals based on a number of factors (including re-tweets, followers, frequency of tweets, references etc measured by an algorithm).