Using data from an academic study of 309, 740 Twitter users, the image on the left represents the typical online social network on Twitter, comprised of people you follow and people who follow you. The image on the right symbolizes your inner circle; the people you send messages to the most.
Social networks have existed for thousands of years “for mediating distal interactions among people,” write the authors of “Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope.”
Because of our busy lives, we don’t have the time to interact with everyone in our networks.
For example, a recent study of Facebook showed that users only poke and message a small number of people while they have a large number of declared friends. And a casual search through recent calls made through any mobile phone usually reveals that a small percentage of the contacts stored in the phone are frequently contacted by the user.
“Attention is the scarce resource in the age of the web,” the Cornell University and HP Labs authors write. It is for this reason that most people interact “with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention.”
Curious why I matter to my network of some 4,000 followers, I broadcasted the following message about an hour ago:
In reverse chronological order (at a moment in time)…
I thank you for following me and for your snippets above. But which side are you?
Scanning through the names, I consider many to be on the left. Some, like Ken Burbary and Geoff Girardin, are on my right. The differences in my mind are based on the length of our online relationship, the frequency of back-and-forth messages, the content I provide, and the value they receive.
The Twitter study concluded:
Many people, including scholars, advertisers and political activists, see online social networks as an opportunity to study the propagation of ideas, the formation of social bonds and viral marketing, among others. This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them.
As we showed in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.
Using words such as “thoughtful” and “interesting,” it appears I provide value; which is the same trait I look for in those I follow. I am hopeful that many on my left can move to the right. But it won’t happen overnight. That shift is also a reciprocal action; I can’t move someone if they don’t want to be moved.
What am I missing? Thoughts?
About Ari Herzog
I noticed this a while back on the bigger networks, such as Facebook and Myspace. It’s almost like high school cliques, only without the judgment and snobbery. Not to say that one wouldn’t allow others into their right ‘column’, but that not everyone is immediately placed there. There is a degree of a filter, and everyone has one set to a different degree..
There are many of the 400 that I follow that are nowhere near my right column, mainly because there has been little to no contact between us besides clicking the follow button. Personally, I would love to welcome all into the right column, but like you said, it takes time.
The toughest thing, I believe, is being on a network such as Twitter, and seeing the hundreds of articles that encourage discovering the fastest ways to increase your follower numbers, and trying to maintain and form new relationships and conversations. Twitter isn’t a numbers game, it is, as someone once said, a dinner party of sorts. Good parties aren’t made by the number of people, they’re made by the quality of people. Steadly increasing your right column, inner circle, or whatever you would like to call it, with those that you mutally identify with, is the best way to spend your time on the Web.
Geoff Girardin´s last blog post..Why is Twitter so Link-heavy?
You know, I have no idea which side I’d fall on – I have a tendency to have so many people that I couldn’t begin to say. When I end up on diagram-generating sites, it just looks like a big sphere.
For me – Twitter is best used the way I use it – which I kind of hope is the same way everyone uses it: the way that best enhances their experience!
I follow you because when we get in conversations, you have well thought out contributions that also make me think. Additionally, because I tend to find your conversations with other people intriguing. Oh, and that you have interesting posts when I click thru, like this one!
Lucretia Pruitt´s last blog post..How You Do It? I’ll Never Know… But You Must Be Awesome
There are actually quite a few people I follow who I don’t want on the right side. I follow them just to keep up with what they’re doing, for the interesting tweets they put forth, to mine for ideas and subject that I might be inclined to read or write about, or purely for their entertainment value.
I like Geoff’s comparison to a dinner party, with a slightly different slant, though. You overhear people talking as you wander around, and don’t pay that much attention to most of it. But every once in a while someone will say something and your ears will perk up and you can join the conversation. It may or may not lead to a closer (Twitter) relationship.
I would bet you that even as your network grows, the same trend will continue – a core group that are actually interacting that is relative even as the numbers increase.
Adriel Hampton´s last blog post..How Can Gov 2.0 Promote Local Economic Development?
You left food for thought. I’d love to be a friend of everybody, and interact more, but I’m too shy to start a conversation. Also in environments like Twitter the language may be a stone on the road, in my case, English is not my mother tongue, so I can understand much more than I can talk, and for what I’ve seen, many people are in the same situation. Anyway social media is powerfull.
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Natalia, may I say that for someone who admits English is not her mother tongue, your grammar, complete with commas, is perfect! By the way, there is no rule saying you must add a comment in English. I may not understand it, but someone else may. Go for it.
It’s amazing, I can’t put into words what I do, or why. I just know that I follow people who bring me to sites or to more people, it’s sort of magnetic… I unfollow when they’re going on paths that I find distracting, and I follow more than a few people I don’t have much in common with on a day to day basis.
Sometimes your blog is like cheap therapy (free really), I get to examine why I do what I do.
Jessica Gottlieb´s last blog post..Friday Confession: Things I said recently
I very much appreciate bloggers who take the time to graph out these studies of social media behavior (again another reason why I follow you). I myself do not have the time of interest to do such activities.
Perhaps this is what puts me in the left column. I’m an avid reader and follower – but you and I don’t engage enough to warrant my name to be place on the right side of the wall.
Is this wrong? No, not at all.
“Attention is the scarce resource in the age of the web,” – very much so.
And this translates to the attention we give our followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook and MySpace. Its natural to form bonds in a social circle, this applies regardless if you have 20 followers or 30,000.
Its the “opportunity windows” that encourage me to connect with as many people as I can. Just because someone is a stranger doesn’t discount them as a provider of valuable information. Guess that has always been the case. Social networks just amplify that fact.
The chance to learn something is greater than the number of followers in any network.
Thank you for sharing this study.
DaveMur´s last blog post..Social Media Lessons from Hannibal Lecter
Hey,
you left the door wide open for comments and i believe you might be right,
however to actually be able to agree or disagree with you, it is necessary to actually now the number of people that twittered back, and in which time frame? Is it possible for you to publish this, if these are not the only people who twittered back? That would be really interesting!
Stefanie
Stefanie Karbach´s last blog post..Gatekeeper vs. Opinion Leader
I wish I had seen the question when you asked it Ari. I follow you for two reasons. 1. You eat quinoa. 2. I am forever striving for that coveted A-List column
Seriously, the number of people I actively engage with is much much smaller that the size of my group. I’ve actually been trying to interact with some new people just to liven things up a little. I’ve been feeling a little invisible since I was away for a couple of weeks.
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I agree strongly with the Cornell University and HP Labs authors that the key consideration is attention scarcity. I blogged about this in post entitled The Real Twitter and An Attention Ponzi Scheme, and then followed those up with a proposed Twitter Analog to PageRank to provide a more useful influence / authority measure than follower or retweet count. I really like Twitter, and it kills me to see it degenerate into a parody of high-school status jockeying.
I don’t think Twitter is a usual beast. There are 3 different circles to me on Twitter: 1. People who choose to follow me – I try to understand who they are and provide content that would interest them. I watch the amount of chatter I may cause, hence 50% of what I want to say does not go into tweets. 2. People who follow me, because they know me well from personal interaction – this is the crowd that gets DMed. Anytime I find something of value to them, DM is the way I communicate. 3. People I follow, because they save me time. How? They tend to come across content important to me and that content comprises more than 75% of their feeds. They are on my VIP column of TweetDeck and are the first tweets I read.
At the end of the day, Twitter is helping me find a lot of valuable information in less time. For networking and relationships I like the good old face2face.
Apolinaras “Apollo” Sinkevicius´s last blog post..Keeping entrepreneurs out of jail and an early grave
What I find interesting is that teens aren’t into Twitter. Ross Levinsohn, a partner at Velocity Interactive, got rep from 30 of his portfolio companies in a room and more than half said they could not live without Twitter. Then he asked the 13 teens from the LA area in the room what they thought and they hadn’t heard of it. Levinsohn asks whether we’re the ones sort of hyping Twitter and its valuation since we use it, and that we need a reality check every once in a while as we discuss these things.
I don’t know how to respond to Jessica calling me a therapist. A cheap therapist, at that! Maybe I should charge her–and only her–to add a comment, sort of like lying on my couch.
Stefanie, you can see the people who twittered me by using tools such as Twitter Search and running an advanced query by filling in the respective start and end dates and anything sent to me. The above constituted the nuts.
I agree with the anti-teenage twitter knowledge, Brian. I recently ran into some high school sophomores and asked them about Facebook, which they used but hadn’t heard of the micro blogs. Heck, they don’t read any blogs.
Two months after writing that comment, I come back to this blog post–and if Jessica is right and I’m a cheap therapist, then I’m shortly to take some of my medicine….
Hello,
This is a nice post. I like Twitter as like you have said you can interact and “listen” to many people and learn lots. But only have to share information with certain people. This allows me to increase knowledge of the topic i know, but can slowly learn about other topics.
Dan,
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