WEP_influence report_09 2009_18S - Page 1 - The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter a publication of the Web Ecology Project Pub. 04 (2 September 2009) ANALYZING INFLUENCE ON TWITTER http://webecologyproject.org Authors By Alex Leavitt with Evan Burchard, David Fisher, & Sam Gilbert We would also like to thank Jon Beilin, Mac Cowell, and Tim Hwang for their invaluable contributions, feedback, and support. About The Web Ecology Project The Web Ecology Project is an interdisciplinary research group based in Boston, Massachusetts focusing on using large scale data mining to analyze the system-wide flows of culture and community online. In addition to the task of understanding culture on the web through quantitative research and rigorous experimentation, we are attempting to build a science around community management and social media. To that end, we are building tools and conducting research that enable planners to launch data-driven campaigns backed by network science. For press or research inquiries, please visit our website (http://webecologyproject.org), contact us via email at contact@webecologyproject.org, or call Tim Hwang (CEO) at [973] 960-4955. The Web Ecology Project releases this paper under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). 2 September 2009 page 2 ANALYZING INFLUENCE ON TWITTER http://webecologyproject.org Executive Summary Using a new methodology based on the content and responses of 12 popular users, we determined measurements of relative influence on Twitter. We examined an ecosystem of 134,654 tweets, 15,866,629 followers, and 899,773 followees, and in response to the 2,143 tweets generated by these 12 users over a 10day period, we collected 90,130 responses published by other users. Summary of Findings An analysis of our methodology and statistics suggests that on Twitter, among various configurable conclusions: • • • • mashable is more influential than CNN. sockington is more influential than MCHammer, while MCHammer is more influential than three major social media analysts (garyvee, Scobleizer, and chrisbrogan). Celebrities with higher follower totals (eg., THE_REAL_SHAQ and ijustine) foster more conversation than provide retweetable content. News outlets, regardless of follower count, influence large amounts of followers to republish their content to other users. 2 September 2009 page 3 ANALYZING INFLUENCE ON TWITTER http://webecologyproject.org Following Followers: Judging Influence on Twitter As a simple online platform for conversation, Twitter is an ideal an ecological system through which we can understand the relationship between users and their environments on the Web. Especially compared to other social networks, Twitter simplifies most of the extraneous features and boils down its environment to people and content. The unusual simplicity of Twitter, though, continues to warp perception of how the relationship between user and platform operates. Many of the popularized studies examining influence on Twitter fail to identify the nuances of social interaction in the system. While attempts have been made (eg., http://twinfluence.com/about.php), the analyses tend to focus on the connections between users rather than the relationship of users, content, and platform. This report therefore aims to supplement previous investigations of the Twitter environment with more comprehensive data sets to enhance new approaches to understanding the concept of “influence” on social networks. A focus solely on the connections between users skews an understanding of how influence operates and flows on Twitter. A popular metric of perceived influence on Twitter measures the quantity of a user’s followers. In general, the more followers a user possess, the more impact he appears to make in the Twitter environment, because he seems more popular (namely, that users follow him). This statement makes senseassuming that Twitter acts as a successful broadcast medium, where a user publishes a tweet and it is read by every follower. However, this view of Twitter as a broadcast medium ignores the potential for users to interact with the content on the platform. A similar and equally popular metric to measure influence on Twitter relies on the ratio between the number of a user’s followers and the number of other people that the user follows (his audience, or as we designate in this report, followees). This ratio, while better than the former method of counting followers, is still imprecise. Again, a ratio based on audience ignores the ability for a user to interact with content on the platform. However, the ratio of followers to followees does inform a better understanding of how influence can operate in Twitter’s environment. 2 September 2009 page 4 ANALYZING INFLUENCE ON TWITTER http://webecologyproject.org The ratio of followers to followees may communicate the intended purpose or emergent practices of a user. For example, if the ratio approaches infinity (high follower total versus low followee total), the user account might be described as focusing on the material aspect of Twitter. By material, we mean a compulsion toward moving content to other users in the environment. In another instance, if the ratio approaches 1 (an equal or near-equal amount of followers and followees), the user might be categorized as a conversationalist. The user most likely follows back a majority of his followers, to retain familiarity with more personal conversations. Contrarily, the materialistic user aims to collect followers as contacts to whom the user may push content (who may then share the same content with other users). Finally, if the ratio approaches zero (low follower total versus high followee total), we might categorize the user as a spammer. As an emergent behavior, the stereotypical spammer attempts to collect users with the intent to push content to as many people as possible after achieving a high follower tally. However, most contemporary users can spot the stereotypical behavior of a spammer or bot, resulting in the low follower total on the spammer’s account. While the follower to followee ratio does not represent an accurate measurement of influence on Twitter, the ratio does inform the community to types of users. Before we apply these types to our understanding of online influence, we must first define influence. Defining Influence on Twitter An attempt to define a universal concept of influence on the Web remains difficult, because we must account for the variations of platforms, fluidity of environments, and evolving behaviors of users online. Because each platform is different, this report will rely on a definition of online influence specific to the environment of Twitter. Therefore, we define influence on Twitter as the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user. The term user is defined by Twitter’s platform. The term action deserves further explanation. 2 September 2009 page 5 ANALYZING INFLUENCE ON TWITTER http://webecologyproject.org Understanding the term action as it relates to influence on Twitter depends on the fundamental structure of ideas in the environment and how these ideas move. The fundamental unit of content on Twitter is the tweet (a user may type up to 140 characters and publish them to the web interface), so an action on Twitter comprises all interactions of a user and that unit of content (tweet). While we can analyze various types of influential actions (eg., a view on YouTube or a like on Facebook), this report will primarily focus on actions specific to Twitter. Our analysis of influence on Twitter, then, relies on the understanding of how actions shape behavior on the platform. Influence as Actions; Actions as Responses While actions on Twitter comprise both those interactions recognized by the platform as well as unexpected emergent behaviors that become widely used by users, Twitter recognizes two actions intrinsic to the system that can occur: the reply and the retweet. Reply: @username {content} Example: @chrisbrogan Thanks for this. I’m new to twitter and it was really helpful Digitaltonto (on 2009-08-15 at 00:47:17) Retweet: RT @username {content} RT @aplusk great article thank U RT @Morgan_Johnston: this great article on health care by Whole Foods cofounder/CEO cheerok (on 2009-08-15 at 00:31:10) The reply and retweet are categorized as actions because they are applied by a user to a piece of content. The reply acts as a response to another user’s tweet using new content, while the retweet operates as a citation or paraphrase of another user’s previous content. While both actions have different purposes, both 2 September 2009 page 6 ANALYZING INFLUENCE ON TWITTER http://webecologyproject.org are meant to move content to other users (albeit in differing ways). If a reply or retweet exists with respect to a given tweet, the actions are evidence for influence that has occurred. A reply occurs because a user is influenced to reply to the content; a retweet occurs because a user is influenced to reproduce the content. Literally, the actions are markers of influence. Two other actions that appear frequently on Twitter, extrinsic to the system yet popular enough to have become adopted by users, require explanation: the mention and the attribution. Mention: {content} @username ({content}) Watching @BarackObama speak in Colorado on @CNN RareAir24 (on 2009-08-15 at 19:08:51) Attribution: {content} via @username ({content}) Fire at Kuwaiti wedding kills dozens, official media says http://bit.ly/wn95A (via @cnnbrk) ChilliGaz (on 2009-08-15 at 19:40:18) Similar to the reply and the retweet, the mention and the attribution are categorized as actions because they too are applied by a user to a piece of content. We have separated the mention and the attribution from the more fundamental reply and retweet because the former two actions are not officially recognized by the Twitter platform. In fact, a mention is similar to a reply, except a mention occurs at some point in the tweet other than at the beginning. Comparably, an attribution is similar to a retweet, except an attribution borrows the symbology of the reply to provide a citation for previously published content. We must also note here that, first, while we distinguish the attribution from the mention, we have calculated them from the same database query. Any measurement in this report of mentions also encapsulates attributions; however, we will distinguish the attribution as separate from the mention later in the paper (by tallying it alongside retweets in certain equations). Second, since mentions theoretically serve 2 September 2009 page 7 ANALYZING INFLUENCE ON TWITTER http://webecologyproject.org the purpose of replies, and attributions the purpose of retweets, we have not expounded upon their use in the explanation of influence in the following paragraphs. However, we can hypothesize that the applications of replies include mentions and the applications of retweets include attributions. Categorizing Actions: Conversation & Content In the second-to-previous paragraph, we hint at a similar categorization for actions that we previously applied to users. Given two probable types of users, one focused on conversation and another on content, we can map these classifications to actions -- replies and retweets, respectively -- to explain how the relationship between users of and the actions on a platform shapes influence on Twitter. The purpose of replies assumes that a conversation is the intended goal of the action. In writing a reply, the user has been influenced to respond to a previous unit of content published by another user. Similarly, with a retweet (the objective of which is to push content), the user has been influenced by a previous user’s content to reproduce the content for other users to view. In basic terms, we can see the reply as talking back to the first user and the retweet as passing on content to a third user. However, when assigning values of influence to these types of actions, we do not give preference to one or the other. Previously, we examined two possible approaches to measuring influence on Twitter: 1) counting the total number of followers a user possesses, and 2) calculating the ratio of a user’s followers to a user’s followees. These two approaches still ignore the relationship between the user, the content, and the platform. The goal of this report is to move beyond these basic assertions about influence by analyzing a comprehensive set of replies, retweets, and other actions on Twitter that act as evidence for the influential potential of users. Understanding Influence with New Data For this report, we gathered relevant data from 12 Twitter users for 10 days, between 12:00 am 15 August 2009 and 12:00 am 25 August 2009. We focused on a small number of celebrities, news outlets, and social media analysts widely perceived to be among the more influential users on Twitter. Based on the 2 September 2009 page 8 ANALYZING INFLUENCE ON TWITTER http://webecologyproject.org content and connections of these 12 users, we examined a total of 134,654 tweets, 15,866,629 followers, and 899,773 followees. In response to the 2,143 tweets generated by these 12 users of the 10 day period, we collected 90,130 responses (actions) published by other users (which equates to 87,987 more messages than total original tweets, or a total average of 42 responses per tweet). We have listed the 12 users below, categorized into three distinct groups that we feel ultimately represent the user types previously discussed. We have also calculated the total number of tweets published by each user, the total number of each users’ followers, and the total number of users that each of our 12 users follows. These statistics were updated between 28 August 2009 and 30 August 2009, so they may not necessarily reflect the exact number of tweets, followers, and followees present during the 10-day window that our data encompasses. Celebrity Ashton Kutcher Shaquille O’Neil Stanley Kirk Burrell Sockington Justine Ezarik News Outlet CNN Breaking News BarackObama.com Mashable.com CNN Social Media Analyst Username aplusk THE_REAL_SHAQ MCHammer sockington ijustine Username cnnbrk BarackObama mashable cnn Username garyvee chrisbrogan Scobleizer Tweets 3,205 2,072 6,016 5,711 7,718 Tweets 1,096 330 17,914 11,607 Tweets 7,532 48,341 23,112 Followers 3,407,385 2,092,541 1,331,797 1,089,984 605,441 Followers 2,712,530 2,018,016 1,363,510 193,625 Followers 862,790 94,715 94,295 Followees 209 562 31,202 380 3,039 Followees 18 761,851 1,925 50 Followees 9,683 88,431 2,423 Gary Vaynerchuk Chris Brogan Robert Scoble The above table has been arranged in decreasing order by total followers, based on the three distinct categories of users. These categories reveal certain resemblances to aspects of content user types and conversation user types. Generally, news outlets aim to push content, social media analysts strive to perpetuate conversations, and celebrities tend to do both (dependent on their personal practices and the community 2 September 2009 page 9 ANALYZING INFLUENCE ON TWITTER http://webecologyproject.org who follow them). While there are some anomalies (eg., BarackObama), most news outlets have a higher follower to followee ratio (materialistic) while most analysts have a more-equal follower-to-followee ratio (conversationalist). For celebrities, the ratio appears to favor a materialistic purpose on Twitter, but the responses generated by celebrities favor the conversationalist type. In the graph below, we present a comprehensive diagram of total follow count, to reemphasize the perceived influence that each user projects. Keep in mind that although Robert Scoble (Scobleizer, ranked 12th) appears unimportant compared to Ashton Kutcher (aplusk, ranked 1st), Scoble still retains a high level of perceived influence across the entirety of Twitter, since his total number of followers amounts to over 94,000 (compared to many users that have between 50 and 1,000 followers). 2 September 2009 page 10
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