Your friends have more companions than you do: study

No matter how smart and funny you think you are, those you follow on Twitter and Facebook have a larger following than you, due to the inherently hierarchical nature of social media networks, a new study has found.
In the social hierarchy of connections, people mostly either follow up or across; they rarely follow down, according to Naghmeh Momeni Taramsari from McGill University in Canada.
"Most people tend to think that they are better than their friends when it comes to intelligence, memory, popularity, and other personal traits," said Taramsari.
"However, a recent study by other researchers shows that this perception is false, at least in the context of online social networks," she said.

"In reality, our friends really have more friends than we do, on average. Moreover, our friends are more active (post more material), and are more influential (their posts are viewed and passed on more often). This is known as the Generalised Friendship Paradox," she added.
Researchers set out to discover to what extent the friendship paradox is present in the online social network Twitter, and how exactly it is reflected in the network structure (who follows whom).

After using new methods to measure user influence and the extent to which the Generalised Friendship Paradox exists in social networks, researchers concluded that almost all users (up to 90 per cent of us) experience this paradox - even those with relatively high levels of activity and influence.

That is because people at any level of activity and influence tend to follow others who are more active and influential than themselves, according to Michael Rabbat from McGill University.
"Social networks do not simply comprise a few ultra-popular people with tens of millions of followers, followed by the masses, and who themselves only follow a few others," said Rabbat.
"Rather, Twitter is hierarchical in the following sense - those who have millions of connections mostly follow others with million connections. Those with thousands of connections mostly follow others with thousands or millions of connections," he said.
"Those with a few connections follows others with few, thousands, or millions of connections. Apparently, it is just the way we are connected," he added.

The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.