Measuring message propagation and social influence on Twitter.com

Abstract

Although extensive studies have been conducted on top of online social networks (OSNs), it is not clear how to characterise information propagation and social influence, two types of important but not well defined social behaviour. This paper presents a measurement study of 58 M messages collected from 700 K users on Twitter.com, a popular social medium. We analyse the propagation patterns of general messages and show how breaking news (Michael Jackson’s death) spread through Twitter. Furthermore, we evaluate different social influences by examining their stabilities, assessments, and correlations. This paper addresses the complications and challenges we encounter when measuring message propagation and social influence on OSNs. We believe that our results here provide valuable insights for future OSN research.