Perhaps you tweet like a fiend, all day and every day. You are followed by hundreds, nay thousands of people. You appear pretty popular – but how much influence do you really have?
According to research by HP Labs, not as much as you might think.
“High popularity numbers does not necessarily add up to high influence and vice versa,” says Dr Bernardo A Huberman, director of the Social Computing Lab.
He and his fellow researchers devised an algorithm to measure tweets with the aim of measuring why and how some posts get more attention and “bubble to the top”.
In a paper called Influence and Passivity in Social Media [502.29KB PDF], the algorithm assigns a relative influence score and a passivity score to every user. The labs examined nearly 3 million public tweets.
“There is an immense amount of passivity on Twitter with its 105 million users,” says Dr Huberman.
“Everybody tweets thinking that everyone is going to learn about your tweets but in order for that to happen someone has to read them, find them interesting and pass them on.”
Dr Huberman says the algorithm “notices how messages from a user propagates. You could be tweeting and have 50,000 followers but if they don’t retweet your stuff, it doesn’t go anywhere and that is where the measure of influence is.” The team tracked how far up the food chain a retweet goes to understand influence.
So what is the value of all this? The lab’s analysis of tweets to predict whether a movie will be a box-office hit suggests some possible practical applications:
“Imagine when you are discussing or pushing products, trends, public policy or say politics. We can discover the two people who are making an impact there and not just target those who have millions of followers.
“These people, these influentials inside a network are responsible for bubbling stuff up to the top and that is how we become aware of certain things.”
The $64,000 question is: how do you become a person of influence on Twitter? Dr Huberman says it’s down to the content of your tweet. Make it interesting, novel, fun, off the chart and surprising – and, mostly, make sure it resonates with the audience:
“This has a lot do with the fact that humans are very social people.
“You have all these people who say look at me, read me, see me, download me, buy me. And what is it that finally captures your attention and the attention of millions? That it elicits an emotion.”
So who makes the grade?
• @mashable – Social media blogger
• @jokoanwar – Film director
• @google – Search giant
• @aplusk – Actor
• @syfy – Science fiction channel
• @smashingmag – Online developer magazine
• @michellemalkin – Conservative commentator
• @theonion – News satire organisation
• @rww – Tech/social media blogger
• @breakingnews – News aggregator
