Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy
This a Paper discussed in Social Media Analysis 10-802 in Spring 2010.
Citation
Measuring user influence in twitter: The million follower fallacy, Cha, M. and Haddadi, H. and Benevenuto, F. and Gummadi, K.P., ICWSM 2010
Online version
[http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/cha10influence.pdf Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy ]
Summary And Dataset
This paper characterize influence of a user in social media. A more influential user causes others who are connected with him/her to act in a certain way. We can use information about influence in some practical applications such as viral marketing.
Twitter data collected for 54M users is used for experiment. Total number of follow links present in the dataset is 1,963,263,821. Dataset has 1,755,925,520 number of tweets.
Three different measures used to compute influence in this paper are:
1. Indegree: Total number of followers. Essentially it computes how many people at most read tweets of a particular twitter.
2. Mention: Number of mentions for a twitter. This reflects how many people has listened to a tweeter and mentioned him/her in their tweets.
3. Retweets: Number of retweets for a specific user.
Authors also investigate in the paper whether the influence of a user holds across all topics or is it topic specific?
Findings
Influence computed using above measures is then compared using Spearman’s rank correlation[1]
Correlation between these measures for top one percent users is as following:
Indegree vs Retweets: .109
Indegree vs Mentions: .309
Retweets vs Mentions: .605
This shows that there is stronger correlation between Retweets and Mentions. In other words we can say that users who get mentioned more also get retweeted more often.
To compare influence across topics, they choose tweets related to three famous topics of 2009. These topics are the Iranian presidential election, the outbreak of the H1N1 influenza, and the death of Michael Jackson. Among the users who tweeted about these topics, there were 13,219 users who tweeted about all three topics.
They found that most influential users hold significant influence across topics.
