When followers are not enough
by Luca on 03/12/10 at 5:39 pm
[italian version]
We have just gathered a brand new datased of FriendFeed data (you can download it in the Data section, it’s named 2010-a dataset ). Since it is considerably larger than our previous database we decided to test few more hypotesis on information propagation in SNSs. One of the key concepts speaking about the ability to spread online information is that being well connected is a key element in propagation strategies. This point can be roughly summarised as: the more followers you have the more you can inform. We’ve already challenged this assumption before and we wanted to test it deeper.
Therefore we analysed the relationship between the actual number of followers and the average audience of every users. We defined the average audience value as the average number of users been exposed to the messages sent by a specific user during our sample time. Due to the technical structure of Friendfeed users that were able to start the most engaging discussions have a larger opportunity of have an actual audience larger that the simple list of their followers.
Followers /Avg Users
As it is shown in the graph – that shows only the top 20 users according to their followers number – there could be a huge difference between the followers and the actual audience that users can engage. It is very interesting to point out how the users with a larger average audience is ranked only 18th according to the followers number.
As we said before, when we’re dealing with social phenomena and users engagement (as it happens in online propagations): followers are not enough.
