On Twitter, a Close-Knit Network

If Kevin Bacon had a Twitter account, he would most likely be within six degrees of separation from nearly everyone else on the site.

Just as everyone in the world is thought to be connected to one another within six steps (and the prolific movie star is linked to just about every other actor in the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”),data from the social media consulting firm Sysomos finds that the same holds true for Twitter users.

The findings are further evidence of the connectivity of the microblogging site. A now dormant Facebook application called Six Degrees established the mean degrees of connection between Facebook users as 5.73, meaning the site’s users are less connected than on Twitter.

On average, it takes visiting just 3.32 friends of friends for users to find one of their own followers, suggesting that many connections on the network are local and circular.

“Twitter’s high degree of connectivity makes it a great platform for marketers to reach a large number of users easily,” said Nilesh Bansal, Sysomos’s chief technology officer. “The report indicates that with only a few re-tweets, their messages can reach a very large audience.”