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Information Systems and e-Business Management
Published in: Information Systems and e-Business Management 3/2012

01-09-2012 | Original Article

Information or attention? An empirical study of user contribution on Twitter

Authors: Huaxia Rui, Andrew Whinston

Published in: Information Systems and e-Business Management | Issue 3/2012

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Abstract

Social broadcasting services, such as Twitter and YouTube, are revolutionizing the way we access information and publish our own content. What is the key innovation of such services? We argue that the key innovation of social broadcasting services is recognizing and connecting people’s need for information and attention. While the value of information is widely studied, the importance of attention is less well understood. We use a collection of nearly 3 million Twitter user profiles to study the cross-sectional characteristics of user behavior; we also monitor 521 active Twitter users over a period of 282 days to carry out time-series analyses and a panel data analysis of user behavior. The empirical results consistently suggest that people’s search for attention is an important motivation for them to contribute content on Twitter. This finding supports our conceptual view of social broadcasting services as innovative platforms connecting people’s need for information and attention. It also has important implications for practitioners in this booming field.
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Footnotes
1
User-generated content also has potential value to companies. See, for example, a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Follow the Tweets”, by Rui, Whinston, and Winkler, published on November 30, 2009.
 
3
Because these Twitter accounts are protected, their profiles can not be retrieved by Twitter APIs. Hence, these protected Twitter account profiles are not included in our sample.
 
4
The use of the term social broadcasting here is inspired by one of the reviewers of the paper.
 
5
The fact that we can only retrieve non-protected Twitter account profiles with Twitter APIs is also consistent with the scope of our study because people who set their profiles as protected are more likely to use Twitter as a social networking tool and people who set their profiles as non-protected are more likely to use Twitter as a social broadcasting tool.
 
6
These days, search cost is low because of many powerful search engines that are freely available.
 
7
OSS is not the same as social broadcasting, but the nature of cooperation is similar to that of social broadcasting. Developers spend time developing valuable open-source software while users spend time using these software to obtain value from their usage.
 
9
Because institutional Twitter users and individual Twitter users may have different motivations of tweeting, we have excluded Twitter users who are apparently institutional users. Among the 512 users we tracked, there is no institutional user. However, there might be institutional users in the cross-sectional sample. To further reduce the potential bias caused by the existence of institutional users in the cross-sectional sample, we did a cross-sectional analysis on users without URL and obtained qualitatively same results.
 
10
The number of user profiles we can collect is restricted by Twitter’s API usage policy. Currently, each IP address can only make 150 queries per hour and collecting one user’s profile cost one query. To select the 6 million users, we first selected several hundred Twitter users and then use certain Twitter API to find out the user IDs of all the followers and followings of those users selected initially. Then we accumulated more user IDs by finding out the followers and followings of those newly-acquired user IDs. We repeated this process and stopped when we accumulated about 50 million user IDs. After this step, we randomly selected about 6 million user IDs among the user IDs we had collected and started the process of querying the profile of each user ID among the 6 million users.
 
11
Because our dependent variable is log-transformed, “average” is in the sense of geometric mean.
 
12
Because we have normalized the maximum length of biography from 160 to 1, a 16-character increase in biography is equivalent to an increase of Bio by 0.1.
 
13
There were days when Twitter was overloaded or our data collection system experienced malfunction, so our observations may not necessarily be obtained from consecutive days. Also, some of the users only have observations for about four months. The average number of observations for these users is about seven months.
 
14
We also excluded users whose number of updates changed abruptly sometimes. We believe these abnormal changes were caused by glitches in Twitter services.
 
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Metadata
Title
Information or attention? An empirical study of user contribution on Twitter
Authors
Huaxia Rui
Andrew Whinston
Publication date
01-09-2012
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Published in
Information Systems and e-Business Management / Issue 3/2012
Print ISSN: 1617-9846
Electronic ISSN: 1617-9854
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-011-0164-6

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