Yesterday Sysomos released another study on Twitter, this time focusing on the friend and follower relationships. They analyzed over 5.2 billion connections on Twitter network as documented here http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/sixdegrees/. The study provides insights on properties of the Twitter ecosystem and how information flows.
Some of the highlights of the study are:
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The “Six Degrees of Separation” for Twitter is actually five.
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Using the Twitter network graph, we discovered that, on average, a Twitter user will encounter 83% of all other Twitter users by visiting everyone’s friends up to a distance of five steps. This means, the Twitter network has good social connectivity, and that, in theory, a re-tweet (RT) does not have to propagate that much to reach a potentially large number of people!
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There are many small, circular connections on Twitter. If you look at your friends, and their friends, you will find someone who follows you.
Twitter users have five degrees of separation between each other – meaning nearly everyone within Twitter is only five steps away. Of all friendship distances, five steps is the most common (41%), while a friendship distance of four steps is the second-most common (37%).
Here is a pie chart that shows the different Twitter friendship distances:
