Having a large number of followers on
Twitter is a more efficient strategy to gain popularity on the social
networking site than increasing your number of tweets, said a study.
Messages from influential people have much more impact and less
popular users can gain popularity by increasing their activity and their
tweets, but the outcome is costly and inefficient, the findings showed.
"Having a larger number of followers is much more important than the
user's 'effort' or activity in sending lots of messages," said head of
the research team, Rosa Benito from the Technical University of Madrid
in Spain.
Twitter is a heterogeneous network, or rather, one where there is a
large number of users with very few followers (61 on median, according
to O'Reilly), and a few - very few - with an enormous number of
followers (up to 40-50 million).
According to the study, on heterogeneous networks like Twitter the
way in which users send messages does not matter, because there is
always going to be a highly influential minority.
With this type of distribution, network position or 'topocracy' comes before meritocracy, the researchers noted.
"The data shows that the emergence of a group of users who write
fewer tweets but that are largely retweeted is due to the social network
being heterogeneous," Benito added.
"Ordinary users can gain the same number of retweets as popular users
by increasing their activity abruptly. Then it is possible to increase
their influence through activity, but it is costly and inefficient,"
Benito concluded.
The study appeared in the journal Social Networks.
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