Conversation practices and network structure in Twitter

First Monday, 2008

Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the "declared" set of friends and followers.

2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014

Among the diverse forms of communication and information networks found in the Web 2.0 environment, "social" and "informational" communication networks have been characterized in terms of their network metrics. Although Twitter is partly based on relationships between actors, activity has been shown to reflect characteristics of information networks. This study examines activity in Twitter within spaces defined by hashtags on political topics. We gathered our own data on a hashtag associated with the 2012 Hawaii senatorial race and compared our results to those from other political hashtag networks, and to typical social and information networks as well as random graphs. Results show that hashtag-centered reply and retweet networks in this domain do not fall clearly into the social or informational categories. There appears to be a third kind of network associated with political debate. More generally, it may be productive to conceive of communication networks in terms of multidimensional characteristics rather than categories.

2015

The increasing use of social media around global news events, such as the London Olympics in 2012, raises questions for international broadcasters about how to engage with users via social media in order to best achieve their individual missions. Twitter is a highly diverse social network whose conversations are multi-directional involving individual users, political and cultural actors, athletes and a range of media professionals. In so doing, users form networks of influence via their interactions affecting the ways that information is shared about specific global events. This article attempts to understand how networks of influence are formed among Twitter users, and the relative influence of global news media organisations and information providers in the Twittersphere during such global news events. We build an analysis around a set of tweets collected during the 2012 London Olympics. To understand how different users influence the conversations across Twitter, we compare three...

B QUT Digital Repository: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ Bruns, Axel (2011) How long is a tweet? Mapping dynamic conversation networks on Twitter using Gawk and Gephi. Information, Communication & Society.

We examine the growth, survival, and context of 256 novel hashtags during the 2012 U.S. presidential debates. Our analysis reveals the trajectories of hashtag use fall into two distinct classes: "winners" that emerge more quickly and are sustained for longer periods of time than other "also-rans" hashtags. We propose a "conversational vibrancy" framework to capture dynamics of hashtags based on their topicality, interactivity, diversity, and prominence. Statistical analyses of the growth and persistence of hashtags reveal novel relationships between features of this framework and the relative success of hashtags. Specifically, retweets always contribute to faster hashtag adoption, replies extend the life of "winners" while having no effect on "also-rans." This is the first study on the lifecycle of hashtag adoption and use in response to purely exogenous shocks. We draw on theories of uses and gratification, organizational ecology, and language evolution to discuss these findings and their implications for understanding social influence and collective action in social media more generally.

Sixth International Aaai Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2012

In this paper we analyze Twitter as a news channel in which the network of followers and followees significantly corresponds with the message content. We classified our data into twelve topics analogous to traditional newspaper sections and investigated whether the spread of information depended upon the Twitter network of followers and followees. To test this, we mapped the social network related to each topic and calculated the occurrence of retweet and mention messages whose senders and receivers were interconnected as followers and followees. We found that on average 10% of retweets (RT-messages) and 5% of direct mentions between users (AT-messages) in Twitter hashtags are sent and received by users interconnected as followers and followees. These figures vary considerably from topic to topic, ranging from 15%-19% within Technology, Special Events and Politics to 3%-5% within the categories Personalities and Twitter-Idioms. The results show that hard-news messages are retweeted by a considerably larger community of users interconnected as followers and followees. We then performed a statistical correlation analysis of the dataset to validate the classification of hashtag in news sections based on retweet connectivity.

Twitter is now well-established as an important platform for real-time public communication. Twitter research continues to lag behind these developments, with many studies remaining focussed on individual case studies and utilising homegrown, ideosyncratic, non-repeatable and non-verifiable research methodologies. While the development of a full-blown 'science of Twitter' may remain illusory, it is nonetheless necessary to move beyond such individual scholarship and towards the development of more comprehensive, transferable, and rigorous tools and methods for the study of Twitter, at large scale and in close to real time.

2017

Users in social network either unicast or broadcast their messages. At mention is the popular way of unicasting for Twitter whereas, general tweeting could be considered as broadcasting method. Understanding the information flow and dynamics within a Social Network and modeling the same is a promising and an open research area called Information Diffusion. This paper seeks an answer to a fundamental question whether the at-mention or the uni-casting pattern in social media is purely random in nature or there is any user specific selectional preference? To answer the question we present an empirical analysis to understand the psychosociological aspects of Twitter mentions network within a social network community. To understand the psychological pattern we have analyzed personality (Big5 model: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) of users and to understand the the sociological behavior we analyze values (Schwartz model:Achievement, Benevolence, Conf...

Social networks have transformed the conception of the television audience. In order to adapt to a viewer increasingly active on the Internet, televisions conducted social media strategies to generate interactivity and attract users to their social profiles. One of them is based on the live-tweeting phenomenon, in which the conversation is encouraged through publications on Twitter during the broadcast of the programme. This research analyses the effectiveness of live-tweeting as a strategy for promoting user traffic on social networks and its impact in the social audience. According to a quantitative methodology, we have selected four Spanish prime time programmes broadcasted during the first half of September 2016. The aim is to study the network of interactions generated around the programme during its broadcast and the degree of influence of the official profiles in each case.

As the use of Twitter has become more commonplace throughout many nations, its role in political discussion has also increased. This has been evident in contexts ranging from general political discussion through local, state, and national elections (such as in the 2010 Australian elections) to protests and other activist mobilisation (for example in the current uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, as well as in the controversy around Wikileaks).