One of the most interesting questions in social networks is who influences whom. This question obviously applies also to Twitter. Politicians, activists, companies, celebrities, religious leaders or advertisers might use Twitter to spread short messages to the world in order to influence people in a way or another. Hence, one starts to be curious, who has much influence in the world of Twitter. Twinfluence.com is one renown example of an application trying to measure the influence of Twitter users. And by now, also researchers in IR and social sciences are looking at this field and have made some interesting observations.
But, before going into the analysis of who influences whom on Twitter, it is necessary to address the question of what influence actually means. Cha et al. [1] provide a definition taken from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: "influence is the power or capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways". Leavitt et al. [2] define influence in the context of Twitter "as the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user". All these definitions are still quite vague, but [3] states, that there actually is no crisp definition of the concept. Cosley et al. [3] consider the adoption of behaviour as an observable result of influence between users. However, they looked at Wikipedia as a social network of editors contributing to articles, not at Twitter. For Twitter it would be more difficult to define behaviours.
So, what did these studies look at, and how do they eventually define and measure influence?
The concrete definition of influence of Leavitt et al. [2] was based on actions. For Twitter they defined actions based on the tweets and came up with four categories: retweets (of the form: RT @username), replys (@username at the beginning), mentions(@username in the middle) and attributions (via @username in the middle). The authors also provide a further classification for the first two actions: retweets are more content oriented actions while replies are conversation oriented. This classification goes along a line of thought dividing the users in more content oriented and more conversation oriented users. Content oriented users spread their messages, the conversation oriented users employ Twitter for communicating with their followers.
Using these types of actions, Leavitt et al. look which of them occur among the followers of twelve popular Twitter users. For instance, they looked at the ratio of retweets, replies and mentions among all reactions to a particular user or at how often followers reacted with an content centric (retweet) or conversational response (reply) to the tweets of the popular users. The numbers were put in relation to the total number of original tweets provided by the observed users. As a result, they observed that some Twitter users that are highly involved in social media create more conversation with their followers. Others, mainly celebrities, have more passive followers, that rarely reply or retweet their messages.
Cha et al. [1] instead looked at a comparison between retweets (of both forms: RT @username and via @username), mentions and indegree of users. They state, that the indegree (so the number of followers) measures a user popularity, the number of retweets captures the ability to generate content that gets passed along and the number of mentions is the ability to engage others in discussion and conversation. An analysis with Spearman's rank correlation revealed, that indegree is not related to the other two factors, while retweets and mentions are stronger correlated. Cha et al. also analyzed the numbers of retweets and mentions on three well chosen topics and found out, that influence is different depending on the topic.
Romero et al. [4,5] incorporate the passivity of users in the calculation of influence. Passive users merely consume incoming messages, but do propagate information to the network. This means the influence of a user is determined not only by the number of followers, but also on the willingness of the followers to pass messages on.
In general the research on influence in Twitter is focusing on users and their social networks. The tweets themselves are merely considered as types of actions that reflect the influence a user has over his followers. This seems suitable to grasp the overall influence of a user, but not the influence of the tweets themselves.
[1] Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy
Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabricia Benevenuto, Krishna P. Gummadi, AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2010
[2] The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter
Alex Leavitt, Evan Burchard, David fisher, Sam Gilbert, Web Ecology Project, 2 September 2009
[3] Sequential Influence Models in Social Networks
Dan Cosley, Daniel Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Xiangyang Lan, Siddharth Suri, AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2010
[4] Ethan Bauley, What makes a tweet influential? New HP Labs social media research may provide answers http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Data-Central/What-makes-a-tweet-influential-New-HP-Labs-social-media-research/ba-p/81855 ((August, 20th 2010)
[5] Daniel Romero, Wojciech Galuba, Sitaram Asur, Bernardo Huberman, Influence and Passivity in Social Media, 2010
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