Abstract:

The willingness for people to share information, experience, and knowledge online, coupled with a variety of digital social networks, attracts huge population of users worldwide to engage in User
Generated Content (UGC). Does the stratospheric growth of users consuming digital UGC imply quality enhancement of one’s social circle? Is UGC a gold mine for the users who are looking for the social relationship? Or is UGC really an economic gold mine for business, but actually dross for social experiences? The interplay between business interests and user’s social interests are important to forecast UGC’s business impact in the long run. To answer some of these questions, we investigated the numberof followers a typical Twitter user can attract by following 2000 other randomly chosen Twitter users. The followers attracted over a 50-day period in fall 2009 are documented and analyzed. Our preliminary result discovered the real number of followers who are not commercially originated, e.g. marketers or spammers, is about 2%, much lower than anticipated. It implies Twitter is hijacked as an economic platform for business rather than for social activities. If most followers are marketers or spammers, the social impact is probably much less than what is commonly perceived. On the other hand, the ‘followings’ of typical Twitter users have much lower number of marketers or spammers; therefore, Twitter still affords a positive user experience by tapping into UGC. Our study paves the way to understand the asymmetric impact of followers vs. followings on users. It appears that the asymmetry in the fidelity of followings and followers may play an important role to the ecology of Twitter (micro-blogs) type UGC.