Measuring Influence on Twitter

Abstract

A survey took in MAT 1372 about students\u27 opinions on Twitter showed that most of them assumed that if a Twitter account has more followers, it will receive more likes or replies. However, accounts can buy followers, and followers do not necessarily mean engagement. In this paper, we used Twitter because it is a significant player in social media, but we can measure influence without using Twitter\u27s follower count. We took a reference from Meeyoung Cha\u27s article The Million Follower Fallacy, which has demonstrated that the Twitter follower count is a meaningless metric in determining influence. To measure influence, a new metric was developed, which is what we called The User Ratio