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Twitter Trends Visualized

From beSpacific, a research paper from the Pew Research Center identifies patterns on Twitter that may help us understand social media conversations better. "There are at least six distinct types of conversations on Twitter based on the structure of people's networks, the subjects and content sources that matter to them, and the way they interact. These networks have different structures that reflect the social activity within them: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub ad spokes."

Essentially, the study looks at who replies to and mentions who in tweets. For example, for political topics, "it is common to see two separate, polarized crowds take shape," forming two groups that don't interact with each other. Here's an image of the Polarized Crowd:


So, while social media sites are good sources of information about possible clients, witnesses, and the like, consider the bigger trends and points you can make when looking at these larger data sets.