This is an awesome piece of social media research from Meeyoung Cha from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, a must read for every marketer that takes social media seriously.
The
paper makes three key observations based on the analysis of 2 billion follow links among 54 million users who produced a total of 1.7 billion tweets (pretty solid data, visit
http://twitter.mpi-sws.org/ for a detailed description and the data sharing plan).
- Popular users who have high indegree are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions.
- Most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics.
- Influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic.
People have different levels of expertise on various subjects. When it comes to marketing, however, this fact is generally ignored. Marketing services actively search for potential influencers to promote various items. These influencers range from “cool” teenagers, local opinion lead- ers, all the way to popular public figures. However, the advertised items are often far outside the domain of expertise of these hired individuals. So how effective are these mar- keting strategies? Can a person’s influence in one area be transferred to other areas? The answer is yes.
Our study provides several findings that have direct implications in the design of social media and viral marketing: 1) Analysis of the three influence measures provides a better understanding of the different roles users play in social media. Indegree represents popularity of a user; retweets represent the content value of one’s tweets; and mentions represent the name value of a user. Hence, the top users based on the three measures have little overlap. 2) Our finding on how influence varies across topics could serve as a useful test for answering how effective adver- tisement in Twitter would be if one is to employ influential users. Our analysis shows that most influential users hold significant influence over a variety of topics. 3) Ordinary users can gain influence by focusing on a single topic and posting creative and insightful tweets that are perceived as valuable by others, as opposed to simply conversing with others.
The most followed users span a wide variety of public figures and news sources. They were news sources (CNN, New York Times), politicians (Barack Obama), athletes (Shaquille O’Neal), as well as celebrities like actors, writers, musicians, and models (Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears). As the list suggests, indegree measure is useful when we want to identify users who get lots of at- tention from their audience through one-on-one interactions, i.e., the audience is directly connected to influentials.
The most retweeted users were content aggregation services (Mashable, TwitterTips, TweetMeme), businessmen (Guy Kawasaki), and news sites (The New York Times, The Onion). They are trackers of trending topic and knowledge- able people in different fields, whom other users decide to retweet. Unlike indegree, retweets represent influence of a user beyond one’s one-to-one interaction domain; popular tweets could propagate multiple hops away from the source before they are retweeted throughout the network. Further- more, because of the tight connection between users as sug- gested in the triadic closure (Granovetter 1973), retweeting in a social network can serve as a powerful tool to reinforce a message—for instance, the probability of adopting an in- novation increases when not one but a group of users repeat the same message (Watts and Dodds 2007).
The most mentioned users were mostly celebrities. Ordinary users showed a great passion for celebrities, regularly posting messages to them or mentioning them, without nec- essarily retweeting their posts. This indicates that celebrities are often in the center of public attention and celebrity gossip is a popular activity among Twitter users.
Finally, we found that influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort. In order to gain and maintain influence, users need to keep great personal involvement.
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