MIT Compares Twitter To Virus
Friday, February 3rd, 2012If you’ve thought of Twitter as a sort of modern day virus, you may be interested to know researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) share your sentiments. They’ve published a new study about Twitter’s ‘contagion process’ and found that the exponential growth of the social platform is closely tied to its media coverage.
The study tracked development of Twitter from 2006 to 2009 and found that two major factors played into the micro-blogging platform’s adoption in the U.S.: geography and media coverage.
The Contagion Process
Calling this a ‘contagion process’ because of its similarity to how pathogens spread and assimilate in populations, the MIT researchers pinpointed Twitter’s early growth patterns.
The platform seemed to grow fastest in areas where it was adopted early and had close-quartered urban support to allow for real-world social networking to help it spread. In areas like New York City and Silicon Valley, it was adopted at rates many times higher than it was in other urban, but less connected areas like Austin, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah.
This contagion-like process continued through the four years of the study’s focus. The more socially connected an area or group of users was, the faster Twitter use spread amongst them. Cyberspace is often closer to home than we realize.
This social networking, of course, includes celebrities and news media outlets.
The Media’s Role in Spreading the Twitter Disease
Rapid spikes in Twitter adoption were directly related to news coverage locally and regionally. When Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to see who could get a million Twitter followers first, both accounts saw huge influxes of followers with Kutcher winning by only half an hour.
As the news coverage increased and became more common (and terms like ‘tweet’ and ‘follower’) became part of the nomenclature, the social network exploded in size.
The Study’s Conclusions
Rather than looking at the social network as a constant in terms of use, the MIT study focused on how it was used in terms of spikes and valleys of popularity. By doing this, they found many correlations between the happenings of a geographic area or demographic of people and Twitter’s usage trends.
Initially, Twitter grew fastest amongst the tech-savvy, younger users of Silicon Valley and New York City. It spread in this way to other tech centers around North America before gaining more widespread acceptance amongst everyday users.
Today, Twitter is virtually ubiquitous and most connected devices have either built-in or readily available apps to connect with the micro-blog’s system.
The MIT study can be found on MITnews
