While CNC machines and manufacturing have been around since the 1950’s, 3D printing burst onto the consumer scene in 2012, and while the Star Trek Replicator isn’t ready quite yet, there is a large highly engaged community making steady progress towards making it a reality.
While the community is having a lot of fun, making everything from “benchy the boat” to Iron Man costumes, concerns of printing guns are long in the past as the technology has matured and long awaited promises are starting to come through. 3D printers are now being used for everything from made to measure on-demand organs, to tools floating around on the International space station. It’s not just Academics and Hobbyists at it though, additive manufacturing is big business for big business, from GE to HP, from PwC to McKinsey, 3D printing is a market for those who make it.
Our current situation has revealed a more urgent need, as medical supply chains get disrupted and the world’s businesses go through an upheaval the likes of which we have never seen before, could 3D printing hold the answer?
Mapping the Community
For this report we analyzed 165,000 posts looking at posts from 1st March 2019 to 29th February 2020 to bring you the this list. Below is a network map showing the online conversation around 3D Printing, made using the Onalytica platform, with the top influencer, Avi Reichental at the centre.
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Top 10 Influencers and Brands
We looked at all the individuals engaging on Twitter to bring you a list of the top influential experts discussing 3D Printing. Below we have a list of the top 10 influencers discussing it online. If you’d like to see the whole list, be sure to download the full report.
| Rank | Twitter Handle | Name | Role | Influencer Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | @AviReichental | Avi Reichental | C-Suite | 100 |
| 2 | @joeltelling | Joel Telling | Tech Professional | 96.72 |
| 3 | @josefprusa | Josef Prusa | C-Suite | 84.68 |
| 4 | @christophschel | Christoph Schell | C-Suite | 69.13 |
| 5 | @fotismint | Fotis Mint | Creative Professional | 69.05 |
| 6 | @chris_frieze | Chris Frieze | Creative Professional | 65.92 |
| 7 | @chr1sa | Chris Anderson | C-Suite | 64.27 |
| 8 | @DW_3DPrinting | Leslie Langnau | Journalist | 60.26 |
| 9 | @crussty | Chris Russell | C-Suite | 58.36 |
| 10 | @XometryGreg | Greg Paulsen | Senior Management | 57.31 |
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Disclaimer: As ever with these lists, it must be stressed that the ranking correlates to a strong indication of influence. The individuals listed here are undoubtedly influential when it comes to driving discussion around the above key topics. Onalytica’s PageRank based methodology is used to extract influential experts on a particular topic and takes into account the number and quality of contextual references that a user receives – this allows us to identify Topical Authority (reference) – our priority influence metric. We analyzed topical authority via their social engagement on Twitter and how much influential experts were referenced in association with 3D printing on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Forums, Blogs, News and Tumblr content. These calculations also take into account a user’s resonance (topical engagement) relevance (number of posts on topic, and % relevance – the proportion of their social content on the topic) and reach (number of followers). If you want to learn more, please read our article that outlines How to identify your target influencers.
At Onalytica we love building these lists and want to give back to our loyal readers as much as we can. If you’re interested in other topics (such as Virtual Reality, Digital Health, Digital Marketing) be sure to have a look on our blog or why not propose some topics to us on Twitter? Effective influencer marketing starts with identifying relevant influential experts for your brand. Onalytica’s Discovery platform mines over 200 billion posts a year into a curated database of over 700K global social media influencers, including data from Twitter, Blogs, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn Profile Links + Demographic Data. Our software enables you to identify influencers by topic, demographic or content and includes real-time tracking and measurement reporting to scale your influencer relations.
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