The million followers myth on twitter – measuring influence & spreading the spreadability

March 24th, 2010 | Insights

The connections and the links in social media carry multiple meanings – from intimate relationship to casual chit chat or just common interests. These connections allow flow of information and indicate a user’s influence on one another. The report “Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy” (pdf), a collaborative research paper by Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabrıcio Benevenuto, Krishna P. Gummadi presents an analysis of twitter data and comparison of influence: indegree followers), retweets and mentions. The investigation highlights the dynamics of user influence across topics and time and comes up with interesting observations:

1. Popular users who have high indegree are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions.

2. Most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics.

3. Influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic.

More details on dataset and data sharing plan can be found on the project site http://twitter.mpi-sws.org/. The project used a dataset of 2 billion follow links among 54 million users who produced a total of 1.7 billion tweets

Adi Avnit- @dotmad had suggested something similar last year through his blog post- The Million Followers Fallacy. He practices what he preaches and not got into “follow and be followed” game on twitter, in last 8-9 months he has just followed 100 or so more additional people. In the blog post he describes how “The Reach” (follower count) can be manipulated and how it doesn’t mean that people are actually engaged with you, listening and passing along the message.

But why is this influence thingy such a matter of great research and study. ? Well our Marketer friends believe that certain messages have a great chance of spreading if they are sampled and passed along through key influencers in the society. And the challenge is that, this is really very difficult to identify or attribute in the offline world, whereas online connected ecosystems like Twitter now allow you to do that.

The traditional view assumes that a minority of members in a society possess qualities that make them exceptionally persuasive in spreading ideas to others. These exceptional individuals drive trends on behalf of the majority of ordinary people. They are loosely described as being informed, respected, and well-connected; they are called the opinion leaders in the two-step flow theory (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955), innovators in the diffusion of innovations theory (Rogers 1962), and hubs, connectors, or mavens inother work (Gladwell 2002). The theory of influentials is intuitive and compelling. By identifying and convincing a small number of influential individuals, a viral campaign can reach a wide audience at a small cost. The theory spread well beyond academia and has been adopted in many marketing businesses, e.g., RoperASW and Tremor (Gladwell 2002; Berry and Keller 2003).

In contrast, a more modern view of information flow emphasizes the importance of prevailing culture more than the role of influentials. Some researchers have reasoned that people in the new information age make choices based on the opinions of their peers and friends, rather than by influentials (Domingos and Richardson 2001). These researchers argued that direct marketing through influentials would not be as profitable as using “network”-based advertising such as collaborative filtering.

In yet another study Henry Jenkins talks about Media Viruses and Memes. Though it talks about the spreadability of media or content, it can be applied to brands and marketing as well. In the connected world i.e. on the social networks brands themselves are acting as influencer through evangelism and whatever that they are doing there if that content, media or message if that itself is not spreadable, it won’t be passed along no matter what their follower count it. Thus looking at both these studies will help a better understanding of who is the influencer, what is influence and how to influence. Here’s the video if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead’

Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics: 1. Fidelity — memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind; 2. Fecundity — memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves; 3. Longevity — memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.

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