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Finally, we calculated indegree based on the snapshot of from diverse genres. These properties make this group ideal
the network at the time of crawling in 2009, because we for studying how a user’s influence varies across vastly dif-
do not know the time when each follow link was formed. ferent topic genres.
For the calculation of retweets and mentions, however, we
used longitudinal data (i.e., since the beginning of the Twit- Distribution of the influence ranks
ter service in 2006). This difference could have resulted in To get a measure of influence for a given topic, we count
a weaker correlation between indegree and the other influ- only the retweets and mentions a user spawned on the given
ence measures (Table 1). Nevertheless, nearly three quarters topic. Because indegree is invariant across topics, we do not
of Twitter users joined in 2009, suggesting that the effect on use the measure in this analysis.
the correlation would have been minimal. Before investigating the dynamics of influence across top-
ics, we first need to understand the high-level characteris-
Does influence hold across different topics? tics of user influence, such as the degree to which users’
Having defined three different measures of influence on influence can differ. Figure 2 displays the influence ranks
Twitter, we now investigate whether a user’s influence varies of users based on retweets and mentions across the Iran,
by topic genres. In order to investigate this, we first need to Swine, and Jackson topics. The influence ranks are calcu-
find users who tweeted about a diverse set of topics. lated for each topic and a user’s rank may differ for different
topics. The plots show a straight line on a log-log plot, a
Methodology for identifying target topics property that is referred to as the power-law characteristic.
The power-law pattern is indicative of the fact that users’
To find as many users to monitor as possible, we picked three
degree of influence can differ by orders of magnitude: the
of the most popular topics in 2009 that were considered en-
top influentials were retweeted or mentioned disproportion-
gaging and revolutionary in Twitter2 : the Iranian presiden-
ately more times than the majority of users. This suggests
tial election, the outbreak of the H1N1 influenza, and the
that utilizing top influentials has a great potential payoff in
death of Michael Jackson. While all three topics were popu-
marketing strategy.
lar, they span political, health, and social genres. To extract
tweets relevant to these events, we first identified the set of
keywords describing the topics by consulting news websites 10000
and informed individuals. Using the selected keywords, we
Number of retweets
2
(b) Mention influence ranks
The top Twitter trends identified by the Twitter Research team
are listed at http://tinyurl.com/yb4965e. Figure 2: Distribution of user ranks for a given topic
Variation of a user’s influence across topics
100
Mention probability, P
Top 10 users Top 10 users
0.0012
Top 11−100 0.003 Top 11−100
Top 101−233 Top 101−233
0.0009
0.002
0.0006
0.001
0.0003
0 0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug
Time (year 2009) Time (year 2009)
(a) Retweet influence (b) Mention influence
Figure 4: The temporal evolution of retweets and mentions for the all-time influential users. For each data point, the error bars
are centered on the average retweet (or mention) probability, and they extend up and down by two standard deviations.
Although the values of P appear small, they account for cant efforts in conversing with others (e.g., replying to their
a large volume of retweets and mentions: a single most audience). In a sense, they need self-advertisement the most,
popular influential user spawned up to 20,000 retweets and because mass media and celebrities have many other on- and
50,000 mentions over a random 15 day period. In order to off-line channels of to promote themselves.
capture the trend in more detail, we classified the influen- While our findings provide an interesting view of how dif-
tials into three groups based on indegree: the top 10 users, ferent groups of people maintain their popularity, we should
who were mostly the mainstream news sources; the next 90 also emphasize that our analysis is in retrospect but not
users, who were mainly celebrities; and the rest, who were a causal. These findings are based on the set of users who
mixed group of public figures and opinion leaders that com- ultimately became popular. We also mention that all influ-
peted with the traditional mass media. entials put efforts in posting creative and interesting tweets,
The evolution of the retweet probability in Figure 4(a) as shown from the high correlation in their retweet ranks.
shows that all three groups mildly increased their influence
over time. Large error ranges for the top 10 users indicate a Rising influence of the ordinary users
much wider variability in the popularity of this group. The Finally we examined the users who increased their influence
growth, however, is marginal for all three groups. We con- over a short time period to understand what behaviors make
jecture that the marginal increase is due to the limited num- ordinary users influential. We focused on the set of users
ber of tweets users post a day. Broadcasting too many tweets who talked about only one news topic, out of the three news
puts even popular users at a risk of being classified as spam- topics in Table 2, and picked the top 20 users for each news
mers. Hence, Twitter users should moderate the number of topic based on indegree. We call these users topical influ-
broadcast tweets in order to avoid crossing their followers’ entials. The topical influentials included dedicated accounts
information processing limit. like iranbaan, oxfordgirl, and TM Outbreak who suddenly
The evolution of the mention probability in Figure 4(b) became popular over the course of the event. These users
shows distinct patterns for the three groups. The top 10 were literally unheard-of at the beginning of the news events
users fell in popularity over time; the next group had consis- and didn’t receive any retweets or mentions prior to the rel-
tent influence scores over time; and the last group (the least evant news event. The list also included users like kevinrose
connected among the three) increased their popularity over (the founder of digg.com) and 106andpark (BET.com’s mu-
time. Users in the last group, surprisingly, spawned on aver- sic video site) who were already popular on a specific topic,
age more mentions than the top 100 users. While this trend and used the news events to extend their popularity.
is counter-intuitive at first, the differences between mentions We tracked the influence scores of the 60 topical influ-
and retweets can explain the trend. entials over the 8 month in 2009. Again, we computed the
The mainstream news organizations in the first group are variable P as the probability that a random tweet posted in
retweeted the most, but they are not mentioned the most. a 15 day period is a retweet (or a mention) to that user. Fig-
This is because their names come up mostly when their con- ure 5 displays the temporal evolution of influence for the
tent get retweeted; it is hard for media sources to engage topical influentials. Overall, the influence scores are much
users with their identities alone. The second group, com- lower than that of the global influentials in Figure 4. This is
prised of celebrities, is more often mentioned than retweeted expected since topical influentials had 3 to 180 times fewer
because of their name value. Their tweets also get retweeted, followers than the global influentials.
when influence is transferred across topics (Table 3). Evan- Influentials on Swine flu experienced relatively stable in-
gelists in the last group successfully increased their influ- fluence scores for both retweets and mentions. This is be-
ence. While many factors could explain this phenomenon, cause no single day involved a catastrophic event due to
our manual inspection revealed that these users put signifi- Swine flu. Influentials on the Iran election increased their
0.0005
Retweet probability, P
Mention probability, P
Iran 0.0006 Iran
0.0004
Jackson Jackson
Swine Swine
0.0003 0.0004
0.0002
0.0002
0.0001
0 0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug
Time (year 2009) Time (year 2009)
(a) Retweet influence (b) Mention influence
Figure 5: The temporal evolution of retweets and mentions for the topical influential users