Influence and Passivity in Social Media
Twitter is now one of the hottest social networking and micro-blogging service. According to a report, there are approximately 20 million active adult twitter users, the users who are more than 18 year old and access Twitter via any platform at least monthly. According to a recent report, an average twitter user has 126 followers. Google has 2.5 million followers and Kanye West has 1.2 million followers. When a twitter user is measured on his or her ‘influence,’ the first thing considered is the number of followers. However, a recent report from the HP Labs’ social Computing Lab says the number of followers does not measure the attention to the subject the followed one brings up.
The link above is the report from the HP Labs’ social Computing Lab. According to the report, no matter how many people follow a user, his or her influence does not depend on the raw number of followers but followers’ commitment with the network formed by the user. In other words, it does not matter how many people reads what the user tweets, but how many people react actively on it. The social computing lab devised a new algorithm called ‘IP Algorithm,’ which scores users based on their influence and passivity. ‘Influence’ measures not only the quantity but also quality of audience, and ‘Passivity’ measures the difficulty of influencing him or her. The report makes a conclusion: “This study shows that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”
This study shows how strong and weak ties are different in quality. In lecture, the strength of ties is measured by the number of minutes two people talk on the phone. In Twitter, the strength of ties is measured by involvement of followers, such as retweeting. Twitter was invented for the sharing of ideas and information. For a user to get attention to the subject he or she brings up, the user needs to be followed by not only many but also active users. In other words, to be ‘influential’ in Twitter, one needs many strong ties. The reports demonstrate that a user can be more influential by being followed by 10 active followers than followed by 1000 passive followers. For example, NFL is ranked in 110th by the number of followers. However, IP Algorithm ranked NFL in 2244th, based on the passiveness of followers and retweeting. On the other hand, cyberaurora, Tech New Website, is ranked in 446207th by the number of followers. However, it is ranked in 163th by IP-influence. It means that even though NFL is followed by much more users, cyberaurora is actually much more influential on Twitter users.
Twitter may be seen as one way network since a few users are followed by the majority of users, shaped like a pyramid, and the users followed by many users may be considered as influential, but they are not. The influence depends not on the number of ties a node has, but the strength of ties.