Most people “expect the most prolific tweeters or those with most followers would be most responsible for creating” huge trending topics on social networks. But research shows otherwise. Researchers found that the mainstream media, especially those like The New York Times, CNN and BBC, act as “feeders” for news topics on Twitter, helping to amplify and in turn make something into a trend on the social network.
To prepare the report Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay, researchers from Hewlett-Packard’s Social Computing Research Group led director Bernardo Huberman, analysed over 16 million Twitter messages spanning 40 days last fall.
They also found that a number of messages from mainstream news sources became trends after they were retweeted, or sent along in messages by Twitter members to their followers. The paper noted that 31 percent of Twitter messages on trending topics were actually retweets by other users.
This type of study is especially relevant on a network as large as Twitter — which is quickly becoming an online news source — as the trending topics can vary widely at any moment and often signal current news events.
But not all trends appear from the mainstream media, the study found; a large number rise from nonmainstream sources. This was a change from the pre-Internet era, “when social media consisted of little more than conversations held in person and over the phone.”
The full study can be found here.
