Is twitter evolved into a social news medium? That is what a recently released research report indicates.
In one of the largest twitter research projects to date, a team of researchers recently analyzed a massive data set of more than 40 million users, 1.4 billion social connections, 100 million tweets, and 4,000 trending topics. Their study indicated a number of insights:
1.) Twitter now shows reciprocity of roughly 20%, meaning that only 20% of people mutually follow each-other. Reciprocity is mutual social acknowledgment, and is an indicator of bi-directional social relations. Most social networks are in the 50%-90% range indicating that most people mutually friend (or know?) each-other. Following somebody on twitter means something different – less mutual, more one-directional, more online.
2.) More than 50% of topics are headline driven, and another 30% of topics are ephemeral in nature, like events. Only 7% of topics are persistent. Taken together, this means that more than 80% of trending topics have a very short shelf life.
3.) Retweeting is the key social activity in Twitter, but 96% of retweets are only “one hop.” While most retweeting happens within the network of the writer/tweeter, retweeting can exponentially and rapidly grow the readership of a news item. The slide presentation has some killer visual representations of the importance of retweeting.
In sum, the data indicates that twitter has evolved to become more of a social news medium. A place where we get the latest news in real-time and then vote on it instantly by retweeting.
Posted by John Kanarowski 
