Investigating the Influence of Offline Friendship on Twitter Networking Behaviors

We investigate the influence of offline friendship in three specific areas of Twitter networking behaviors: (a) network structure, (b) Twitter content and (c) interaction on Twitter. We observe some interesting findings through the empirical analysis of 2193 pairs of users who are online friends. When these pairs of users know each other offline, they are more likely to (1) respond to the online gesture of friendship from their friend, (2) share mutual online friends, (3) distribute and gather information in their friend's Twitter network, (4) pay attention to their friend's tweets, (5) post tweets that might be of interest to their friend, (6) post tweets similar to their friend's, (7) respond to their friend's tweet, (8) mention their friend in tweets, and (9) distribute their friend's tweets. Overall, offline friendship drives social networking activities on Twitter.

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