media

Twitter was supposed to be a democratic tool, but here is the reality – bloggers follow bloggers, celebrity follow celebrities and media follows media. A research conducted by Yahoo reveals interesting data points: “Roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users—where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed.” The study classifies users using Twitter Lists into “elite” and “ordinary” users (snowball sampling), further classifying elite users into one of four categories of interest— media, celebrities, organizations, and bloggers. Some findings from the research: There is considerable support for the two-step flow of information—almost half the information that originates from the media passes to the masses indirectly via a diffuse intermediate layer of opinion leaders, who although classified as ordinary users, are more connected and more exposed to the media than their followers Attention remains highly concentrated, where roughly 0.05% of the population accounts for almost half of all posted URLs.