Who controls social networks?
In the Facebook world, users play the role of either kings (or trendsetters ) or lemmings. Such conclusions were made by researchers, the purpose of which was to analyze how information is spread in social networks.
Disputes about how the exchange of ideas and lines of behavior in social groups are going on for more than a decade. According to the so-called hypothesis of influential persons, which became widespread, for example, in the book The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell , a relatively small group of people have the greatest influence on others. For example, if the parents of a popular child in school buy him an iPhone, then many other children will follow their example. Critics of this idea argue that the point here is rather how ready the society is to accept new ideas.
The dispute remained unresolved, because to put the correct experiment in this area is a rather complicated undertaking. But now researchers have the opportunity to take the help of social networks, such as Facebook, with theirarmy of hamsters by a multimillion audience. And what's great is to do it absolutely free.
Two researchers from New York University (Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker) used for their purposes a certain application from Facebook, which enables users to evaluate films and recommend them to their friends (which application is not specified at the request of the company). The application works as follows. If you rate any film, a message is sent to several of your friends selected at random, informing them of the rating, and the link to the application itself is also sent. The more friends who install the application after receiving a notification from you, the higher the degree of your influence. The shorter the time elapsed between receiving a notification and installing the application, the higher the susceptibility of your friend.
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In 44 days, almost 8t users sent more than 40t notifications to 1.3 million friends, and about 1,000 of those friends installed the application. The researchers then built an “infection” distribution model through this social network. If the hypothesis in question is correct, most mailings should come from a small number of key people.
As it turned out, in reality it is necessary to take into account both the influence and susceptibility at the same time. For example, it turned out that more influential people over the age of 30, that peers have the greatest influence on each other and that women have more influence on men than on each other. But what is most interesting is that the same person does not combine influence and susceptibility (at least among Facebook users), there are only trendsetters and their followers.
The separation between influence and receptivity can be important for the development of Internet marketing. It can be assumed, for example, that Facebook will start statistics on these indicators from its users, and will show them more advertising or focus advertising on them when launching new products on the market in order for them to influence others with their “influence”.
Based on ScienceNOW.
Disputes about how the exchange of ideas and lines of behavior in social groups are going on for more than a decade. According to the so-called hypothesis of influential persons, which became widespread, for example, in the book The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell , a relatively small group of people have the greatest influence on others. For example, if the parents of a popular child in school buy him an iPhone, then many other children will follow their example. Critics of this idea argue that the point here is rather how ready the society is to accept new ideas.
The dispute remained unresolved, because to put the correct experiment in this area is a rather complicated undertaking. But now researchers have the opportunity to take the help of social networks, such as Facebook, with their
Two researchers from New York University (Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker) used for their purposes a certain application from Facebook, which enables users to evaluate films and recommend them to their friends (which application is not specified at the request of the company). The application works as follows. If you rate any film, a message is sent to several of your friends selected at random, informing them of the rating, and the link to the application itself is also sent. The more friends who install the application after receiving a notification from you, the higher the degree of your influence. The shorter the time elapsed between receiving a notification and installing the application, the higher the susceptibility of your friend.
')
In 44 days, almost 8t users sent more than 40t notifications to 1.3 million friends, and about 1,000 of those friends installed the application. The researchers then built an “infection” distribution model through this social network. If the hypothesis in question is correct, most mailings should come from a small number of key people.
As it turned out, in reality it is necessary to take into account both the influence and susceptibility at the same time. For example, it turned out that more influential people over the age of 30, that peers have the greatest influence on each other and that women have more influence on men than on each other. But what is most interesting is that the same person does not combine influence and susceptibility (at least among Facebook users), there are only trendsetters and their followers.
The separation between influence and receptivity can be important for the development of Internet marketing. It can be assumed, for example, that Facebook will start statistics on these indicators from its users, and will show them more advertising or focus advertising on them when launching new products on the market in order for them to influence others with their “influence”.
Based on ScienceNOW.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/146333/
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