All About Who You Don't Know; You're More Likely to Retweet A Stranger Than Someone You Know

When it comes to retweeting a tweet on Twitter, it's not about what you don't know, but who you don't know, according to a new study of interactions on Twitter, Yahoo News reported.

The report, which comes out of Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business, found that users are more likely to retweet people who don't follow them than people who do.

Using a complex system of 20 computers to track the social network website, the report followed 140 days' worth of tweets in late 2010.

At the end of the 140 days, the team of researchers - Zhan Shi of ASU, Huaxia Rui of the University of Rochester and Andrew Whinston of the University of Texas at Austin - concluded that you're about 50 percent more likely to be retweeted by a random than a mutual admirer, according to Yahoo News.

Tweets that were singled out by the now-defunct @toptweets account, an official Twitter handle that spotlighted noteworthy or popular tweets, were analyzed by the researchers. Then they identified tweets sent out by users with fewer than 1,500 followers, due to limits on the data the researchers would be able to collect from Twitter.

From there, a program fetched retweet data on who was retweeting the tweet, and via whom, Yahoo News reported.

At the end of 140 days, the team analyzed the connections and concluded that, "those who don't know you well are more likely to retweet."

Specifically, a tweet of median quality (as defined by the study) will be retweeted 6.0 percent of the time by someone you also follow. If you do not follow that person, the likelihood goes up to 9.1 percent, Yahoo News reported.

Those interested in buying the full study online can purchase it in MIS Quarterly in March.