A study from HP Labs, Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay, sampled more than 16 million tweets to work out how a subject becomes a trending topic — and found that established news organisations, among them CNN, the New York Times and the BBC, were doing most of the driving. Follower counts and tweet volume mattered far less than the source.
“We found that mainstream media play a role in most trending topics and actually act as feeders of these trends,” said Bernardo Huberman, HP Senior Fellow and director of the company’s Social Computing Research Group. Of the 22 accounts that produced the most retweets while a topic was trending, mainstream media accounted for 72%. The reading that follows is that users were working as a filter and an amplifier for reporting from established outlets rather than as an alternative supply of news, though a significant share of trends did originate outside those outlets.
What the paper undercut was the assumption that a trend translates into public attention. Trending topics turned out to be short-lived, with few lasting longer than 40 minutes. Huberman drew the comparison himself: in traditional media, several days in the news is enough to start a conversation about a subject, and a few hours might do the same in social media, but there was no evidence yet that it did.