Twitter Study

This week I read an interesting study called “Analyzing the Influence on Twitter”. This study was conducted by the Web Ecology Project, based in Boston, Massachusetts. The authors, Alex Leavitt ,Evan Burchard, David Fisher, and Sam Gilbert, focused their research on the influence of the social media website , Twitter. They decided to focus in on a large scale of data to analyze the system  and understand the flows of culture and communication online. To go through this study they used a qualitative method and based their data on the content and responses of 12 popular users. These factors, would measure the influence of Twitter. They chose a wide variety of users from “THE_REAL_SHAQ” TO “CNN”. They examined 134,654 tweets, 15,866,629 fol­lowers, and 899,773 followees. The research showed that over a 10 day period of time,  the 2,143 tweets published, had responses generated by 90,130 other online Twitter users. Their findings came from a number of aspects surrounding Twitter. First they examined the “following” aspect of Twitter. When a user has a large amount of followers they have more of an impact on the Twitter environment.  This is a place where the perception is warped between the platform and the user. When the user has a concrete following community they have a successful broadcast system. 

Shaq is one user that has many followers to broadcast to.

This following community, is not the same for the ratio for the number of user followers to the number of user followees. Users with low followee and high followers may want to focus on material, to publish information to flow through users. A user with an equal ratio of followers and followees is categorized as a conversationalist, someone who wants to become familiar with their followers to create personal conversation.  A user with low follower and high followee is seen as a spammer. The researchers looked at conversations and content, actions and responses, and audience responses as a way of determining the influences.

Their findings included:

• mashable is more influential than CNN.

• sockington is more influential than MCHammer, while MCHammer is more influential than three ma­jor social media analysts (garyvee, Scobleizer, and chrisbrogan).

• Celebrities with higher follower totals (eg., THE_REAL_SHAQ and ijustine) foster more conversation than provide retweetable content.

• News outlets, regardless of follower count, influence large amounts of followers to republish their content to other users.

After reading this, I decided to look at my Twitter and apply the theory of the ratios between followee and followers. I am following more people than people are following me. I would be seen as a spammer but I am trying to build my network not be a spammer. Then I looked at Whole Foods and they are following 582,051 and have 1,754,430 followers. 

Whole Foods tweets are not just about the company or new information. The company is retweeting and personally  answering questions of their audience. 

 I have not seen someone with the equal ratio on my Twitter but I would like to see if the study was right about that example too. For the most part, I do not agree with this study when it comes to the ratios. I am definitely not a spammer and Whole Foods is a conversationalist, not just a publisher.