Better the tweeter you know: social signals on Twitter

Chorley, Martin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8744-260X, Colombo, Gualtiero B., Allen, Stuart Michael ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1776-7489 and Whitaker, Roger Marcus ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8473-1913 2012. Better the tweeter you know: social signals on Twitter. Presented at: Fourth ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing 2012 (SocialCom 2012), Amsterdam, Netherlands, 3-5 September 2012. Published in: Nijholt, A., Vinciarelli, A. and Heylen, D. eds. Proceedings of the 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing: SocialCom/PASSAT 2012. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE, pp. 277-282. 10.1109/SocialCom-PASSAT.2012.27

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Abstract

We present results from a web-based experiment conducted to assess the effect of Twitter metadata on decision making in content consumption. Participants were presented with information concerning two tweets and asked which they would prefer to read. Analysis of the results shows that recognition of the author as being within the readers local network is highly influential in the decision to read a tweet. This has analogies with results from cognitive psychology on decision making processes such as the recognition heuristic. The role of more detailed quantitative metadata has also been assessed. Surprisingly, metadata describing the popularity of tweet authors in terms of the number of followers or the number of tweets written has no significant impact on decision making, while metadata describing the tweet content (the number of retweets) has a significant impact, with a large proportion of users preferring to read content that has been retweeted a larger number of times. When friendship information and quantitative values are combined the impact of the friendship information is reduced, but a larger proportion of users still prefer to choose based on this information, while the impact of the retweet value is reduced.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics Systems Immunity Research Institute (SIURI)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Twitter metadata, cognitive psychology, content consumption decision making, decision making processes, friendship information, quantitative metadata, quantitative values, social signals, tweet authors, tweet content
Publisher:	IEEE
ISBN:	9781467356381
Funders:	EC
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2022 09:37
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/37069

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