Social Interaction Between the Famous on Twitter

For my second blog post I focused on social interaction of the tweets of large organizations or groups. Most of the people I follow on Twitter are either very famous or it is a group or organization. This is because most of my personal friends do not use Twitter. While this could somewhat inhibit my study of the website I believe I still have options. These famous Twitter users tend to get more re-tweets and comments then the average user and therefore I have a better opportunity to observe this social interaction on a larger scale.

One thing I generally noticed and I found particularly interesting was that for Twitter users like CNN, The New York Times, or even Comedy Central tweet about something in general and then include a link about the entire story. I was hoping to find a tweet with ten or more responses but is seems Twitter users just enjoy re-tweeting things those they follow have posted.

For instance at Time.com tweet that was posted about two hours before I did this assignment had  a link to the article concerning the general topic given in the tweet: “Facebook’s IPO bust has spoiled market for everyone”

This is the site a user is redirected to from Time.com's Twitter feed to their topic article on their regular website: http://business.time.com/2012/05/24/has-facebook-jinxed-the-ipo-market-for-everyone/?hpt=hp_t2:

One could argue that it makes sense for Time.com to do this because they are a magazine and wish to redirect traffic on their Twitter page to their regular website. Therefore I also studied another example of famous Twitter user’s tweets

I follow Conan O’Brien on Twitter and found a particularly interesting tweet from him. It was posted on May 21, three days ago, and the topic was comedy, not news. I think that might be the biggest difference. While news is interesting, it does not always inspire the need to re-tweet or comment. Comedy on the other hand does.

I also noted that there were five responses to this funny tweet to the one about Time.com. This tweet was also re-tweeted over 50 times with over 50 favorites. Time.com was re-tweeted over 50 times but only marked as a favorite 16 times.

Followers have a large influence on the number of re-tweets and comments as well. Conan O’Brien has over five and a half million followers and I would assume most of these are young adults because he targets that age group with his late night comedy show. While Time.com only has three and a half million followers and due to the fact that Time is a magazine centered on world social, political and scientific news it is most likely targeted toward the socially and politically aware young adults and older people.