Measuring your Twitter influence
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
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~59~RS~)
Comments
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
I'd like to (and will) make a formal complaint about Maggie Shiels obsession with only 2 subjects; Twitter and Apple.
Maybe she should go and work for Engadget, as I think her talents are wasted on BBC news.
Perhaps someone (knowing more about this kind of stuff than me) should set up a petition on-line to make this happen, as I am aware I'm not the only one who's noticed her inability to report on anything in 'silicon valley' other than these 2 very dry subjects.
Perhaps someone should enlighten Maggie what 'silicon valley' actually is, twitter is certainly not under that canopy, and its debatable that iPhone is too.
"I'm Maggie Shiels and this is my blog for stories about technology from Silicon Valley.", that is the biggest lie ever!
it should read:
"I'm Maggie Shiels and this is my blog for stories about Twitter and iPhones."
I don't pay my TV-licence for this topical biased rubbish.
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dine909:
I would agree there is too much Twitter and Apple related stories in Maggie's blog, but a formal complaint or petition is going over the top. It's one blog, and if the title clearly indicates it is to do with Twitter or Apple you can just ignore it. As for the licence fee comment how much of your licence fee do you really think goes towards this blog? I'm sure the BBC would refund your share but it would take a lot more entries before your share of the cost reaches 1p!
Problem is that when she does blog about something else it barely gets any comments. It hardly proves the point that people are actually interested in any other subjects does it? There are dozens that will foam at the mouth and rant whenever the word 'iPhone' appears but never contribute when a non-Apple or Twitter blog entry appears. If everyone didn't bother reading those blog entries and stories they wouldn't appear in the 'most read' section and give the impression that people actually are very interested in them.
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JN:
I have a formal complaint at stage 2 now : about Twitter and Apple on this blog. Don't be put off - it's taken me SEVEN months to get this far. I could give you the name of the lady responsible for this, but the post would only get deleted.
Twitter in particular (and Facebook) is all over the BBC.
What the BBC managers don't seem to get is that in doing so, they're allowing unknown numbers of US interests to get unfettered access to what the BBC viewing public do.
Maggie Sheils never takes a blind bit of notice of our complaining and when she does "blog" about something else, it's days later than it should be. Often Aunty Beeb's new channels run stuff long before it appears here. We can't ignore it because she has no business promoting (by Proxy) any commercial interest using our money - even a fraction of a penny of it.
The BBC could learn a lot from the way ITV ignored Twitter for the most part and even now, only seems to use it scarcely in comparison.
From what I can see, every twitter message ever sent by anyone is now stored in Twitter's servers: and if that doesn't give you cause for concern, I don't know what does.
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@marcdraco - why should the fact that Twitter has a copy of every tweet cause concern? Most accounts are public, and most are used to broadcast the nano-thoughts of the user to the broadest possible audience - it's completely absurd to think that there's something sinister about capturing the public comments on a public site by people who have chosen to publicise themselves. And if you're using Twitter with a private account - why?
For the record - every public tweet is also archived in the US Library of Congress.
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Not Twitter AGAIN!!
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And she was doing so good as well...
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Great to see the license fee going to something useful!
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"Great to see the license fee going to something useful!"
Yeah, I agree, Maggie Shiels rocks.
btw, what is Twitter?
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So Twitter - the service where people think posting their "thoughts" can make everyone somebody actually makes just about everybody a nobody.
Always knew it was a complete waste of time.
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@Hugo Rodger-Brown essentially this. The BBC is using twitter to collate data about what we watch, do etc. This should logically belong to the BBC - and if you've ever posted an FOI request (I have) to the BBC you'll know that this information receives a stonewall, dead-end response.
However, they are also giving all that information to Obvious (Twitter's owner).
So, if you (I assume) and I cannot get this information through a perfectly lawful FOI request, why is the BBC handing it all to an privately owned corporation who can make money from it.
I don't think anyone in the BBC really thought this through.
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dine is right. Maggie, what about an article on using twitter on your iPhone?
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