Kinda cool study about facebook influence dynamics!
Reshared post from +Christopher VanLang
A Science paper about facebook network dynamics… let's take a look at their abstract.
"Estimation in a representative sample of 1.3 million Facebook users showed that younger users are more susceptible than older users, men are more influential than women, women influence men more than they influence other women, and married individuals are the least susceptible to influence in the decision to adopt the product we studied".
Yup. Reading techcrunch on a daily basis could have told you this. However, their method of testing using "in vivio randomized" experiments isn't a bad idea and probably does a good job of testing their "influentials" hypothesis. Essentially a random set of people were sent a message to repost a like. As expected, influential people will share the post and the post would spread though their influential friends acting as nodes. Nothing really surprising but a nice way to statistically validate that hypothesis.
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[Report] Identifying Influential and Susceptible Members of Social Networks
A randomized experiment based on product adoption among Facebook friends identified trend setters and followers. Authors: Sinan Aral, Dylan Walker