What’s Your Social-Media Genotype?

Your pattern of behavior on Twitter can be defined by a simple “genotype” and used to predict your future behavior, say network researchers.

The researchers start with the hypothesis that each individual has a stable, pre-existing interest in certain topics and that this determines his or her pattern of behavior on Twitter. One of the goals of their research is to determine whether it’s possible to extract an individual’s genotype from the firehose of data that Twitter produces. To that end, they analyzed one data set consisting of 467 million tweets sent by 42 million users in 2009, and another consisting of 14.5 million tweets sent by nine thousand users in 2012. They grouped the hashtags from these data sets into five topics—sport, business, celebrities, politics, and science/technology. “Our hypothesis is that individual users exhibit consistent behavior of adopting and using hashtags (stable genotype) within a known topic,” says Petko Bogdanov at the University of California Santa Barbara. His analysis confirms exactly this—that users tend to adopt a stable pattern of hashtag adoption by these topics. This is their social-media genotype.