Measuring User Influence on Twitter

Seminar: Web-Technologien fr E-Commerce SS 2011

Lyudmil Vasilev, Matr. Nr.: 4190767

Supervisor: Dr. Nikos Korfiatis

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Agenda
1. Introduction
2. Related Work

3. The Study
4. Twitter Structure

5. Comparison of idegree, retweets and mentions

6. Conclusions

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1. Introduction
What is Influence?
The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself. The power to shape policy or ensure favorable treatment from someone, especially through status, contacts, or wealth.
by Oxford Dictionaries Online

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1. Introduction
How is influenced spread?
1. Traditional view

Through influentials
2. Modern view

Through interpersonal relationships Through the readiness of the society to adopt innovations

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2. Related Work
1. H. Kwak et al.: What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? [1]
Number of followers Number of retweets PageRank

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2. Related Work
2. J. Weng et al.: Twitterrank: finding topicsensitive influential twitterers [2]
Number of followers PageRank Modified PageRank

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2. Related Work
3. D.M. Romero et al.: Influence and passivity in social media [3]
Number of followers Passivity of the audience

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2. Related Work
4. M. Cha et al.: Measuring user influence in twitter: The million follower fallacy [4]
Number of followers Number of retweets Number of mentions

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2. Related Work
4. M. Cha et al.: Measuring user influence in twitter: The million follower fallacy [4]
Big and comprehensive Dataset Chosen measures for describing influence The variation of influence across topic & time

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3. The Study
The aim of the study was to find out:
what are the measures that define influence; how do these measures affect the spreading of popular news topics among users; how individuals influence changes by topic and over time; what are the ways for ordinary users to gain

influence.
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3. The Study
Two assumptions were made at the beginning:
1. The number of followers one has (indegree) reveals little about his influence over the other users. 2. The users, who have active audience that is

retweeting their messages and mentioning them,

are much more influential then those who have large number of followers.
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3. The Study
The study made three important findings: 1. Indegree represents popularity of a user, retweets the content value of ones tweets and mentions the name value of a user.

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

3. Ordinary users can gain influence by focusing on a single topic and posting creative and insightful tweets.
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3. The Study
Characteristics of the dataset:
80 million user accounts scanned 54 million in-use user accounts 2 billion social (follow) links 1.7 billion tweets

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3. The Study
Focused on:
active users: posted more than 10 tweets users with a valid screen name Result:

6 million users, who were relevant for the study

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3. The Study
Interaction based on three interpersonal
activities: 1. following updates of people who post interesting tweets; 2. passing along interesting pieces of information to followers (retweeting); 3. responding to or commenting on other

peoples tweets (mentioning).

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3. The Study
Three different types of influence: 1. Indegree influence
indicates the size of direct audience for a user

2. Retweet influence
indicates the ability of a user to generate content

with pass-along value.

3. Mention influence
indicates the ability of a user to engage others in a conversation.
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4. Twitter Structure

Graph 1: Simplified Topology of Twitter

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4. Twitter Structure
Following on Twitter isn't mutual. Someone who thinks you're interesting can follow you, and you don't have to approve, or follow back.
- Twitter Help Center | What Is Following? -

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4. Twitter Structure
The information flow between users has the opposite direction of a follow-connection.

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4. Twitter Structure

Graph 2: Retweet Path

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4. Twitter Structure

Figure 1: Average and median numbers of additional recipients of a tweet via retweeting [1]
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5. Comparison

Graph 3: Marginal Overlap of the top 100 influential users of each category [4]
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5. Comparison

Table 1: Relative Influence Ranks Correlation Coefficients [4]

Table 2: Relative Influence Ranks Correlation Coefficients over Topics [4]

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6. Conclusions
1. Having a lot of followers may represent high popularity, but
it does not necessarily mean having a lot of influence. 2. It is much more important to have active public that retweets and mentions you, than having a lot of followers. 3. Users who create interesting and creative tweets have

bigger chances to be retweeted and mentioned, then

those who rely on indegree to achieve the same effect. 4. An ordinary user can increase his influence by

concentrating on a single topic and posting valuable

information on that topic.
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References
[1] H. Kwak, C. Lee, H. Park, and S. Moon, What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?, Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web, ACM, 2010, pp. 591-600. [2] J. Weng, E.P. Lim, J. Jiang, and Q. He, Twitterrank: finding topic-sensitive influential twitterers, Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, ACM, 2010, pp. 261-270. [3] D.M. Romero, W. Galuba, S. Asur, and B.A. Huberman, Influence and passivity in social media, Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web, ACM, 2011, pp. 113-114. [4] M. Cha, H. Haddadi, F. Benevenuto, and K.P. Gummadi, Measuring user influence in twitter: The million follower fallacy, 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2010.

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Thank you very much for your attention!

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Questions!?

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