Better the Tweeter You Know: Social Signals on Twitter

We present results from a web-based experiment conducted to assess the effect of Twitter metadata on decision making in content consumption. Participants were presented with information concerning two tweets and asked which they would prefer to read. Analysis of the results shows that recognition of the author as being within the readers local network is highly influential in the decision to read a tweet. This has analogies with results from cognitive psychology on decision making processes such as the recognition heuristic. The role of more detailed quantitative metadata has also been assessed. Surprisingly, metadata describing the popularity of tweet authors in terms of the number of followers or the number of tweets written has no significant impact on decision making, while metadata describing the tweet content (the number of retweets) has a significant impact, with a large proportion of users preferring to read content that has been retweeted a larger number of times. When friendship information and quantitative values are combined the impact of the friendship information is reduced, but a larger proportion of users still prefer to choose based on this information, while the impact of the retweet value is reduced.