Interesting facts about Twitter

A recent study by Yahoo Research has shown that Twitter doesn't seem to be as social as we think. The production, flow and consumption of information was examined by making use of the 'lists' on Twitter:  the researchers distinguished between elite users (celebrities, bloggers, organizations and media) and ordinary users. As an interesting result, it came out that 50% of the consumed URLs is generated by just 20.000 elite users! We have to keep in mind that many Twitter accounts are 'sleeping accounts', which means that only 0,05% produces half of the content on Twitter. In addition, it seems that the media produce the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. Although media outlets are by far the most active users on Twitter, only 15% of the tweets that ordinary users receive, come directly from those media. 

There are two ways information can pass through an intermediary in Twitter. 

1. Retweeting. This means that a Twitter user rebroadcasts a received URL, which contains an explicit acknowledgement of the source.

2. Reintroduction. A user tweets a URL that has previously been posted, but this time without acknowledgement of a source. The information is probably rediscovered independently. 

The study shows that although audience attention is highly concentrated on a minority of elite users, a lot of the information they produce reaches the ordinary users indirectly via a large population of intermediaries. 

Another result was that there is great homophily within categories, which means that celebrities follow celebrities, bloggers follow bloggers, etc. There is one exception: organizations seem to pay more attention to bloggers than to themselves. Moreover, the attention paid by organizations is more evenly distributed across categories than for any other category (celebrities, bloggers or media). Take a look at figure 1, which shows how many URLS are received among the different categories.

Figure 1: Number of tweets received among elite categories

Figure 2 shows how much information within each category is retweeted by other categories. As you can see, retweeting is strongly homophilous among elite categories. However, bloggers retweet URLs from all categories. 

Figure 2: Retweet behavior among elite categories.

Furthermore, it was found that different types of content have different lifespans: the time lag between the first and the last appearance of a given URL on Twitter. It seems that media-originated URLs are mostly short-lived URLs, while those of the bloggers are mainly long-lived URLs. Finally, the longest-lived URLs are those referring to videos and music, since they are constantly rediscovered. 


The researchers of the study called 'Who Says What to Whom on Twitter' found consistent results for supporting the 'two-step flow of communications', which means that the mass media influence the public only indirectly. This concept, which is more dan 50 years old, emphasized that "opinion leaders were distributed in all occupational groups and on every social and economic level". This corresponds with the classification of most intermediaries as ordinary in the study. In addition, "the original theory claimed that opinion leaders, just like their followers, received at least some of their information via two-step flows". In general they would be more exposed to the media than their followers. This was also found in the study, since they found that "almost half of the information that originated from the media passed to the masses indirectly via a diffuse intermediate layer of opinion leaders, who although classified as ordinary users, are more connected and more exposed to the media than their followers".