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Mainstream media, such as the New York Times and Reuters, are still the dominant factors driving trending topics on Twitter, new research shows. 

An analysis of more than 16 million tweets on 3361 topics by HP Labs' Social Computing Research Group identified just 22 users who were the source of the most retweets while a topic is trending.

And during a trending topic, 31 per cent of all tweets are retweets.

Sixteen of these 'influencers' were mainstream media, including Twitter accounts for CNN Breaking News, which has almost 3.9 million followers, Huffington Post, Sky News, BBC World Service and the Daily Telegraph. 

Among the non-media Twitter accounts were those from cartoon character Herbert from Family Guy, who has almost 14,000 followers, and America's Major League Baseball, with more than one million.

While describing much content on Twitter as 'seemingly chaotic', the research accepts that certain topics 'manage to attract an inordinate amount of attention, thus bubbling to the top in terms of popularity.

'Through their visibility, these popular topics contribute to the collective awareness of what is trending and at times can also affect the public agenda of the community'.

But in general the research found that few topics last for long times on Twitter, disappearing from view within 20 to 40 minutes. 'Traditional notions of user influence, such as the frequency of posting and the number of followers are not the main drivers of trends, as previously thought,' it added. 

'Long trends are characterised by the resonating nature of the content, which is found to arise mainly from traditional media sources. Social media behaves as a selective amplifier for the content generated by traditional media.'

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