If you’re a regular Twitter user, it’s likely that you’ve encountered a Twitter bot or two. A lot of the time they’ll simply re-tweet your posts based on certain criteria (matching keywords, time of post, random chance – whatever the developer chooses, really). Many of them are set to re-tweet posts about a certain city, or sport, or political ideology – things that come up regularly. The bot will usually re-tweet with the original poster’s user name to flag their attention; following the bot will then allow that user to find other posts from, users who share an interest in whatever he or she just posted. In this manner, bots can stimulate the development of like minded people into larger and more connected social networks.
It is this networking effect that was recently studied (though not specifically intentionally) by researchers involved with the “Web Ecology Project,” a group which studies social networks and the way their users interact. The initial goal was to determine how @responses were generated, but in the quest to garner those responses, automated bots were used – and the researchers decided to follow up that lead with another experiment. They investigated how the addition of these bots to the social mix influenced human behaviour.
Naturally, whenever people see their own name pop up, they tend to investigate. The bots in the experiment were set to retweet certain posts and include people’s names, especially in pairs or more. This led to people discovering others who had been retweeted by the bots, and following those people. In fact, the researchers found major increases in follow rates and conversation rates through the addition of the bots. Seems common sense, but having legitimate verification of the effect and quantifiable data will be a boon to marketers and others who would take advantage of social networks.
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