Retweeting: A study of message-forwarding in twitter

Microblogging communities have grown rapidly over the past few years, with Twitter being one of the most popular. Such microblogging services enable users to `vote for´ and highlight the interesting or useful posts of other users by forwarding or `retweeting´ to their social neighbours. Studying retweeting enables researchers to understand how information is disseminated around Twitter´s social structure and shows which type of information is likely to propagate further. This paper represents preliminary studies of some properties of message-forwarding in Twitter, paying close attention to the dynamics and patterns represented by retweets. These are illustrated through empirical data highlighting properties of retweets, relating these to the friend-follower graph and to message propagation speeds.