Revealing the efficiency of information diffusion in online social networks of microblog

Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as microblogs enable people to simultaneously share information with a large number of peers, and revealing the properties of the formed network structure and the corresponding impacts on information diffusion are important. In this article, we empirically study 10 millions user profiles from the largest Chinese mircoblog, Sina Weibo, and 41.7 millions profiles from Twitter. By studying followers’ topology, we find an invariant characteristic that the followers count of users obeys a power law distribution with exponent near 2. We then investigate the reason from the theoretical view and find this network structure achieves the optimal information diffusion in terms of inducing a minimal propagation times. Our study thus reveals the efficiency of information diffusion in OSNs of microblogs, which is validated by experimental examination, theoretical analysis and numerical simulation.