That’s right. This teeny, tiny group of Twitter users called “Elite” Twitter members, including media, celebrities, organizations, and bloggers, post about half of the Tweets sent out daily. This is only about 20,000 people. The other 99.95% are known as “ordinary” users, and obviously send out the other half.
This was proven by a study done by Yahoo! Research titled, “Who Says What to Whom on Twitter.”
This study also showed that there was a significant amount of homophily within Twitter categories. “… celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc…,” explains the study researchers, Shaomei Wu, Winter A. Mason, Jake M. Hofman, and Duncan J. Watts. Also, media Twitters post the most Tweets, but celebrities are (almost obviously) the most followed.
One other amazing fact that came from this study is that, “…almost half the information that originates from the media passes to the masses indirectly via a diffuse intermediate layer of opinion leaders,” which means that instead of hearing breaking news from news Tweets, ordinary users hear it from celebrities, bloggers, their friends, or anyone with an opinion on a popular news story.
Another important finding was, “…although all categories devote a roughly similar fraction of their attention to different categories of news, there are some differences – organizations, for example, devote a surprisingly small fraction of their attention to business-related news.” Also, different types of content have different lifespans. For example, media-originated URLs have a very short lifespan compared to blogger URLS, which seem to be over-represented. The longest-lived URLS are video and music content, which seem to “persist indefinitely.”
This study was fascinating to read and, if you have any interest in Twitter and social media trends, you should check it out
What do you think about this topic? Are you “guilty” of following dozens of celebrities and reading their Tweets before your morning cup of coffee? Do you normally hear your news information from a third party such as a friend or blogger? Talk about it in the comments below.