Following the Conversation: A More Meaningful Expression of Engagement

Twitter is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the common metric of success is number of followers. Because people use Twitter in a myriad different ways, and the presence of spammers, it is necessary to discover new ways of quantifying success. In this paper, we explore the nature of engagement on Twitter and find the traditional follower/following network to be meaningless in this regard. Building on previous research, we define engagement in terms of interactions using the @ notation, and visualize this as a graph. We then apply clique finding techniques to this graph, to extract a sub-graph of the most important connections in a user’s immediate network.

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