Twitter: Five Degrees of Separation

Everyone is pretty familiar with the concept of “Six Degrees of Separation”, which suggests that everyone is, at most, six steps away from any other person in the world. The other, popular concept is “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon“, which suggests that every actor is the world is only six steps away from Kevin Bacon.

But what about Twitter? How connected are the 60 million or so people on Twitter around the world? According to a new study by Sysomos (a client that provides social media monitoring and analytics services), nearly every Twitter user is just five steps away from each other.

Sysomos discovered this reality after slicing and dicing more than 5.2 billion Twitter friends (the number of friend and follower relationships). Amon the study’s finding are that:

- The most common friendship distance is five steps. (The average distance is 4.67 steps)
- The second most common friendship distance is four steps.
- On average, about 50% of people on Twitter are only four steps away from each other, while nearly everyone is five steps away.
- After visiting an average of 3.32 people within the friend network, Twitter users can expect to find one of their followers!

Based on the Sysomos study, it’s fair say that the Twitter world is pretty small in the scheme of things.

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