Influentials, novelty, and social contagion: The viral power of average friends, close communities, and old news

Author

Nicholas HARRIGAN, Singapore Management UniversityFollow
Palakorn ACHANANUPARP, Singapore Management UniversityFollow
Ee Peng LIM, Singapore Management UniversityFollow

Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2012

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.

Keywords

Social contagion, Subgraphs, Network motifs, Influentials hypothesis, Community structures, Twitter--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing | Social Media | Sociology of Culture

Research Areas

Sociology; Data Science and Engineering

Publication

Social Networks

Volume

34

Issue

4

First Page

470

Last Page

480

ISSN

0378-8733

Identifier

10.1016/j.socnet.2012.02.005

Publisher

Elsevier

Citation

HARRIGAN, Nicholas; ACHANANUPARP, Palakorn; and LIM, Ee Peng. Influentials, novelty, and social contagion: The viral power of average friends, close communities, and old news. (2012). Social Networks. 34, (4), 470-480.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1539

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2012.02.005