Effects of Community Structure in Social Networks on Speed of Information Diffusion

Abstract

Social media users can widely disseminate information, potentially affecting societal trends. Therefore, understanding factors affecting information diffusion in social media is important for successful viral marketing campaigns. In this paper, we focus on the community structure of social networks among Twitter users and investigate how that structure affects the speed of diffusion by retweets. Extracting communities among sampled Twitter users, we investigate differences in diffusion speed between tweets with many intra-community retweets and those with many inter-community retweets. Consequently, we show that tweets with many intra-community retweets tend to spread slowly. We also use community structures in Twitter social networks to tackle the tasks of predicting time intervals between a first tweet and its N-th retweet. We show the potential of community structure features in a social network for predicting information diffusion speed.