Detecting Community Influence Echelons in Twitter Network

We study the interactions in a coherent community on Twitter to examine its structure. In particular we examine if thereexists a hierarchical influence structure induced by the interactions which reflect a ranked partition of the users in thecommunity where users retweet (forward) only messages from other users belonging to an equal or higher ranked group.We extract such ranked partition of the community and show it to roughly align with independently constructed influencescore of users in each echelon. Our research suggests that the relationship and forwarding behavior in online microbloggingcommunity is affected by the underlying social influence structure and the understanding of the structure may help us betterpredict the information diffusion on such online communities