( Fast Company ) -- Forget Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga . On Twitter , mainstream media outlets such as CNN , the New York Times , and the BBC dominate trending topics . According to a new report by HP , trending topics are not determined by how many followers a user has or how prolific a tweeter that user is . After studying a sample of 16.32 million tweets during the fall of 2010 , researchers discovered that 22 users were the source of most trending topic retweets . ( Roughly 31 % of tweets about a trending topic are retweets . ) Of these 22 influentials , 72 % were Twitter accounts run by traditional news organizations , including Reuters and the Washington Post , but other digital-age media outlets such as the Huffington Post were also featured on the top trenders list . ( While Lady Gaga did n't make the top rankings , what appears to be some knock-off Twitter feed run by `` Lady Gonga '' did . We snooped around to learn more about @ LadyGonga and top result @ vovo-panico , but our Portuguese is a bit rough . We reached out to HP to find out why both accounts ranked among some of the world 's top news outlets ... stay tuned . ) However , the report found that social media is not a replacement for news information . `` Twitter users then seem to be acting more as filter and amplifier of traditional media in most cases , '' said Bernardo Huberman , HP Senior Fellow and director of HP Labs ' Social Computing Research Group . This is especially true in the wake of the Egyptian unrest , when Twitter hashtags ( # Mubarak , etc . ) for the protests were constantly trending on Twitter , but filtering users to mainstream media outlets for the most breaking news . Appropriate for the 140-character format , Twitter trending topics disappear almost as fast as they come , suggesting users are hungry for more news . On average , according to HP 's report , 40 minutes is the longest time a topic will stay at the top of Twitter 's trends . Then how do you account for # JustinBieber ? Copyright © 2010 FastCompany.com , a unit of Mansueto Ventures , LLC . All rights reserved .
Major news organizations are frequently cited on Twitter during major events , a report says . Trending topics are n't determined by how many followers a user has . Comment: The most common way to measure the popularity of an article is through Google search results ( google searches ) and Facebook likes ( friends who have liked your post or comment ).