• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, February 17, 2011

The news media drives more Twitter trends than do bloggers, according to a new study from HP Labs social computing division, titled "Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay." While perhaps unsurprising, the study -- based on an analysis of 16.32 million tweets on 3,361 topics sent over a 40-day period -- is testimony to the continued reach and influence of established media companies, confirming an earlier trend which saw most blogs drawing primary content from news outlets (rather than each other).

As one might expect, HP Labs found that a good number (31%) of trending topic tweets are retweets (thus the trending). What's more, HP Labs determined that 22 Twitter members were the sources of retweets concerning trending topics, including CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, ESPN, and El Pais (the leading national daily in Spain); indeed, fully 72% of the twitter streams maintained by this elite "Gang of 22" were from mainstream news organizations.

Bernardo Huberman, HP senior fellow and director of HP Labs' Social Computing Research Group, summarized the results for Information Week: "We found that mainstream media play a role in most trending topics and actually act as feeders of these trends. Twitter users then seem to be acting more as filter and amplifier of traditional media in most cases." From this perspective, the authors write in the study, "social media behaves as a selective amplifier for the content generated by traditional media."

Twitter trends are usually ephemeral at best, according to the same study, with 40 minutes being the maximum lifespan for most trending topics; interestingly, trending topics which cut across diverse audiences tend to last longer, as the news is passed around between different communities and sub-groups. However, even relatively long-lived Twitter trends (originating on Twitter or elsewhere on the Internet, versus within the mass media) tend to be so transient that they fail to gain traction in the mass media. This, in turn, makes it less likely they will influence the national dialogue than trending items originating within the news media.

Turning to individual influence within Twitter, the study found that "traditional notions of user influence such as the frequency of posting and the number of followers are not the main drivers of trends, as previously thought. Rather, long trends are characterized by the resonating nature of the content;" in other words, individual users have greater impact by tweeting a few noteworthy items (as opposed to frantically generating a mountain of crap).

As noted, the Twitter trends data continues an earlier trend which saw established news media outlets dominating primary content in the blogosphere: according to a Pew study  from March 2010, 80% of all links in new media blogs and the like connect to sites maintained by newspapers and broadcast networks.