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.