On Twitter, there are just five degrees of separation between you and almost everybody else on the service. After analyzing over 5.2 billion friend and follower relationships on Twitter, social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos determined that nearly everyone on Twitter is just five steps away from each other, and about half of all the people on Twitter are separated by only four steps.
The famous six degrees of separation also still hold true on Twitter. These six steps cover 98% of all Twitter friendships. The most common friendship distance on Twitter, however, is just 4.67 – and if you visit all of your friends and friends of friends up to a distance of five steps, chances are that you will see about 83% of all Twitter users.
The Power of Retweets
This also highlights the power of retweets. A retweet really doesn’t have to propagate very far to reach a very large number of people. Of course, chances are that not all of your friends and friends of friends will retweet your message – and even then, appearing in a Twitter user’s stream doesn’t guarantee that your message will actually be seen.
The Sysomos team also looked at how far Twitter users would have to roam to meet a follower of their own. According to the company’s data, it only takes 3.32 steps on average (standard deviation is 1.25 steps) before you will find someone who is already following you. As Sysomos’ Alex Cheng notes in the report, this means that “there are many small, circular connections on Twitter.”
