Paper Info
Title
Influentials, novelty, and social contagion: The viral power of average friends, close communities, and old news.
Abstract
What is the effect of (1) popular individuals, and (2) community structures on the retransmission of socially contagious behavior? We examine a community of Twitter users over a five month period, operationalizing social contagion as 'retweeting', and social structure as the count of subgraphs (small patterns of ties and nodes) between users in the follower/following network. We find that popular individuals act as 'inefficient hubs' for social contagion: they have limited attention, are overloaded with inputs, and therefore display limited responsiveness to viral messages. We argue this contradicts the 'law of the few' and influentials hypothesis'. We find that community structures, particularly reciprocal ties and certain triadic structures, substantially increase social contagion. This contradicts the theory that communities display lower internal contagion because of the inherent redundancy and lack of novelty of messages within a community. Instead, we speculate that the reasons community structures show increased social contagion are, first, that members of communities have higher similarity (reflecting shared interests and characteristics. increasing the relevance of messages), and second, that communities amplify the social bonding effect of retransmitted messages. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1016/j.socnet.2012.02.005
Social Networks
Keywords
Field
DocType
Social contagion,Subgraphs,Network motifs,Influentials hypothesis,Community structures,Twitter
Social psychology,Emotional contagion,Reciprocal,Complex contagion,Social network,Retransmission,Psychology,Redundancy (engineering),Operationalization,Novelty
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
34
4
0378-8733
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
17
0.67
10
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nicholas Harrigan1231.52
Palakorn Achananuparp230223.16
Ee-Peng Lim35889754.17