A Study about Influence and Passivity in Social Media
Abstract:~ The ever-increasing amount of information owing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and in uence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation within Twitter reveals that the majority of users act as passive information consumers and do not forward the content to the network. Therefore, in order for individuals to become in uential they must not only obtain attention and thus be popular, but also overcome user passivity. We propose an algorithm that determines the in uence and passivity of users based on their information forwarding activity. An evaluation performed with a 2.5 million user dataset shows that our in uence measure is a good predictor of URL clicks, outperforming several other measures that do not explicitly take user passivity into account. We demonstrate that high popularity does not necessarily imply high in uence and vice-versa.
Introduction:~ The explosive growth of Social Media has provided millions of people the opportunity to create and share content on a scale barely imaginable a few years ago. Massive participation in these social networks is re ected in the countless number of opinions, news and product reviews that are constantly posted and discussed in social sites such as Facebook, Digg and Twitter, to name a few. Given this widespread generation and consumption of content, it is natural to target one’s messages to highly connected people who will propagate them further in the social network. This is particularly the case in Twitter, which is one of the fastest growing social networks on the Internet, and thus the focus of advertising companies and celebrities eager to exploit this vast new medium. Keep reading…
