Social network users may have a large number of Friends or Followers or Followees, but they regularly interact with a much smaller number of people in their inner circle who matter to them and reciprocate their attention.
On Facebook, users only poke and message a small number of people while they have a large number of declared friends.
Mobile phone users regularly call or text message only a small percentage of the contacts stored in their phone.
Now, Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu from the Social Computing Labs at HP have shown that, irrespective of how many followers and followees they have, most Twitter users send @usename messages only to a few other users.
The researchers studies 309,740 users, who on average posted 255 posts, had 85 followers, and followed 80 other users. Only 211,024, or 68%, of these were active users who posted at least twice and the average time between their first and last tweets was 206 days. Also, around 25.4% of all tweets included an @username message.
The research has some interesting analysis on the nature of Twitter Friendship based on @username messages. It defines user A as user B Friend, if user B has included @A in at least two tweets. It is independent of whether only user A is following user B, or only use B is following user A, or both are following each other. So, if a user has very few followers and followees, but uses @username messages very often, the number of his Friends can be higher than the number of his followers and followees.
However, the Friends/ followees ratio is less than 1 for 98.8% of the users, and most users have a value less than 0.10. The average of the ratio is 0.13 and the median is 0.04.
The research also show that even though the number of Friends initially increases as the number of followees increases, after a while the number of friends starts to saturate and stays nearly constant.
This indicates that even though users declare that they follow many people using Twitter, they only keep in touch with a small number of them. Hence, while the social network created by the declared followers and followees appears to be very dense, in reality the more influential network of friends suggests that the social network is sparse.
This finding has significant implications for how influence on Twitter is measured. Specifically, it seems that @username messages and retweets are more important than the number of followers in estimating Twitter influence.
Finally, the research shows that the number of tweets initially increases as the number of followers increases but it eventually saturates. However, the number of tweets increases as the number of Friends increases, without saturating. This suggests that the number of Friends is a more accurate predictor of how active a Twitter user is than the number of his followers.
The research seems to suggest that Twitter users who use @username messages are more engaged in their Twitter network than users who don’t use them. So, if the first rule of Twitter is Robert Scoble’s “who you follow is more important that who follows you”, the second rule of Twitter may be: “how many times you mention others in an @username message is more important than how many times you are mentioned”.
Also see: Om Malik, Jeremish Owyang, Greg Verdino.
