A techie from Bengaluru, Tinu Cherian is one of the 100 most influential Indians in social media. The software engineer beats the likes of Senior Bachchan (and Junior Bachchan to boot) when it comes to social media authority. So how does a regular guy get on a list populated by stars like SRK, Salman Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Bipasha Basu?

The rankings are based on two respected tools, Klout and Peerindex, which are a measurement of online influence. “It’s not just the followers one has on Twitter. It’s about how many people listen to you, mention you and retweet your updates. They also take into consideration the number of Facebook likes, comments, Linked in connections and recommendations and sometimes Quora and Foursquare,” says Tinu, who is also a blogger, Wikipedia administrator and a regular fixture at Wiki meet-ups and Tweet-ups in the city.

In two years, he has posted over 25,000 updates, about everything under the sun! Tweeting upto 100 times a day can take all your waking hours, but not necessarily, he reveals. “It is now an acceptable practice to pre-schedule tweets at a certain time. You also don’t want to bombard your followers with too many,” he says. Plus, these softwares save you time for offline activities. “I’m an amateur artist — I like to paint in my free time,” says Tinu.

So how does a regular Joe climb the social media ladder? “Engage the audience. What happens with many celebs is that they use Twitter as a broadcast medium, instead of a communication platform.”