Who are the real influencers on Twitter?

A new research paper from HP investigating interactions on Twitter reveals:

…the driver of [Twitter] usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

The Social Computing Lab at HP analyzed usage patterns of more than 300,000 Twitter users. Their initial conjecture was that people who receive a lot of attention on a social network pose more often than those who receive little attention. But they determined that the number of friends a user has is a more accurate signal of activity than the number of followers.*

Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies this existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. This latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates that users with few actual friends.

Word of mouth is driven by the hidden social network. How do you find it?

1. * The study defines a “friend” as someone to whom the user has directed at least two @replies. [↩]