I learned through my Twitter friend @eric_andersen, about an interesting article from the Atlantic, What Fuels the Most Influential Tweets? By Jared Keller. It reported on research by a team of investigators at Indiana University researchers Lillian Weng, Alessando Flammini, Alessando Vespignani, and Filippo Menczer who recently published the paper, Competition Among Memes in a World With Limited Attention. They looked at 120 million retweets connected to 12.5 million users and 1.3 million hashtags to model how information disperses on the social network.
To jump to their conclusion, “The research suggests that it doesn't fully matter who you are or how many connections you have, but what you're saying relative to the existing conversation is what really matters in spreading knowledge online.” A celebrity with millions of followers cannot gather more RTs a breaking story than many with far fewer followers are mass reporting on. So the medium is fueled by the message, to twist a phrase by Marshall McLuhan. So if you want to reach a lot of people write about what they are interested in at the moment. You can add your twist but you need to need to be riding the tide of the day.
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