What is Twitter, a social Network or a News Media?

Presented By:Omofonmwan Nelson

Agenda:TwitterBenefits of TwitterTweetTweeter ServicesGeographical DistributionConclusion

What is Twitter?

It is microblog service of about six years old, which help in identifying recent happenings.

It contains 140 character limit per message.

It has a traits of news media.

Why do people use Twitter

Twitter can make it possible to predict movie profits based on tweets.

seeking for helps and opinions.

To get in touch with friends and collegues.

gathering useful information for one’s profession or other personal interests.

Twitter is useful as a low cost channel for posting jobs, coupons, and business announcements.

TweetsTweets are brief messages from a user to its

followers.The unique thing about tweet is that it is limited

to 140 characters, and much shorter than blog post.

Tweet has its own particular abbreviation such as “RT“ (retweet) and “DM“ (direct message).

Retweets

It also means to forward a tweet to your followers.

Information is spread in Twitter in the form of reweet.

Retweet helps to validate others’ thoughts.

Twitter Services

Twitter creates the required infrastructure to make sure that tweets which are written by users are transmitted to all the User’s followers.

Tweets from the user's friends are conveyed to the user in a well-timed method.

Twitter has API functions to obtain user-specific information that can be used to build a network of friends.

Hashtag

In Twitter; phrases, words and hashtags are trailed which are often stated.

Hashtags are words or phrases prefixed with the symbol # character.

Top 20 users ranked by the number of followers, Page Rank in the follower network, and the number of retweets

Twitter Growth Rate

Homophily

Homophily is a tendency that a contact between similar people occurs at a higher rate than among dissimilar people.

According to research, two users who follow reciprocally share topical interests by mining their 50 thousands links

Reciprocity

Low reciprocity makes Twitter different from other social networks.

Only 22.1 percent of Twitter user pairs follow each other.

Geographical Distribution

Twitter provides limited profile information such as name, bio, time zone and location.

Twitter’s popularity is global and the social network of its users crosses continental boundaries

Conclusion:To a large extent, it shows that Twitter is

more of news media, and due to the low reciprocity distinguish Twitter from other social networks.