Two types of Twitter users with equally many followers

  • Authors:

  • Kodai Saito;Naoki Masuda

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan;The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The number of followers is acknowledged as the presumably most basic popularity measure of Twitter users. However, because it is subjected to manipulations and therefore may be deceptive, some alternative methods for ranking Twitter users that take into account users' activities such as the tweet and retweet rate have been proposed. We show that there are two types of users possessing a large number of followers. The first type of user follows a small number of others. The second type of user follows almost as equally many others as the number of its followers. Then, we examine egocentric followership networks of users having many followers. We show, as an example, that users of the second type have higher link reciprocity on average than users of the first type. We conclude that the number of others that a user follows is as equally important as the number of followers when estimating the importance of a user in the Twitter blogosphere.