Power in the Twitter social network
Whenever there is a network, there are bound to be nodes in that network which have more power than others. This power is attained through their position in the network. This position is not simply a matter of how many links are connected to the node; the power a node has in a network is determined by both how many links as well as to whom the node is linked. An example to exemplify this power in a network is Twitter. Twitter is a very large social network with very well-defined links; every follow is a directional link from one account to another. These links result in some nodes being very powerful, and the article linked below discusses how these powerful twitter accounts are used to make money for the account holders.
The source of the money for these accounts is obvious: advertising. Advertisers are willing to pay Twitter account holders money for them to post sponsored tweets. How much money the advertisers are willing to pay, however, comes back to how powerful an account is in the Twitter social network. The article linked to below states “If you have a smaller fan base, but your followers are very engaged with your posts, you can charge more than someone with a large but disconnected following.” A node in a network which is connected to many other nodes does not necessarily mean that that node is powerful. If that were the case, then the most profitable Twitter accounts would be the ones which have the most fake accounts following them. For an example, let’s say an advertiser wants to pay a twitter account to sponsor their brand of knitting needles. One account they are looking at has one million followers, but the account’s main focus is on sports. Another account, however, has only 10,000 followers, but the account only tweets about knitting. To the advertiser, the second account is more powerful because the other nodes it is linked with are much more likely to be interested in buying a pair of knitting needles. To the advertiser, every account which follows the sponsored account could be given a “value”. This value is determined by the accounts likelihood to be interested in their product. The sponsored node is given a value proportional to the sum of the values of the nodes to which it is linked, and this value determines how much a corporation is willing to pay for a sponsored tweet. This is just one example of power in a network, though the ideas behind it can be applied to numerous other networks. A node in a network is only valuable if it links to many other valuable nodes.
Link: http://www.wisebread.com/how-to-earn-extra-income-with-twitter