Information Diffusion in Twitter Communities : Theory driven approach towards explaining topic based information diffusion

In our paper we analyze a set of topical Twitter communities and explored the following hypotheses: The hypothesis of homophily (McPherson, SmithKLovin, & Cook, 2001) and information diffusion: We verified if most retweets end up being transmitted to the same community? We therefore checked if the members that retweeted a given tweet were members of the same originating community as the original author or members one of the other communities, or could not be allocated at all. The hypothesis of strong ties (Granovetter, 1973) and information diffusion: We verified if the chance of a retweet is higher for members that hold strong ties between each other? Here the strength of a tie was defined by their interaction frequency i.e. how often member mention each other in The hypothesis of opinion leaders and brokerage roles (R S Burt, 1999) and information diffusion: We verified if structural network roles of a broker and an opinion leader in a global (network of all members) and local (community wide) had an impact on the way retweets are transmitted through the network. In specific if opinion leaders were able to create more, faster or bigger retweets and if brokers were more successful than others to transfer retweets into other communities or create retweets outside of the community.