Who’s more influential on Twitter? Ashton Kutcher or El Pais?

A new analysis by HP finds that old media has a decidedly greater impact on what becomes a trending topic on Twitter, a ranking which identifies what is “immediately popular.” Rather than being driven by personality or frequency, the study found that “(t)he main determinant of whether an item trends – much more than who tweets about it or how often – was the specific subject of the tweet.”

“When topics originate in media outlets, the social medium acts as filter and amplifier of what the standard media produces and thus contributes to the agenda setting mechanisms that have been thoroughly studied for more than three decades,” the study says.

This is true, HP says, even though media leaders tend to have significantly fewer followers than Twitter’s top accounts, like such Ashton Kutcher and Lady Gaga.

“The HP team collected data from Twitter’s own search API over a period of 40 days in the fall of 2010,” HP said in a blog post about their study. “From the resulting sample of 16.32 million tweets, they identified 22 users who were the source of the most retweets when a topic was ‘trending.’ Of those 22, 72% were Twitter streams run by mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the New York Times,El Pais and the BBC.”

There’s no question that Twitter has become a significant news discovery medium, whether or not one believes it can start a revolution or accelerates them. Twitter’s ability to drive traffic may not be as significant as other sharing services but as a human telegraph it has no rival.

Trending topics is a mixed bag, and they can be bought — promoted Tweets are clearly marked as such. Often there seems to be no rhyme or reason for a trend, and sometimes time of day and novelty is afoot.

But even though Twitter’s ability to drive traffic back to a site isn’t as powerful as other social media, it is a place were conversations start and spread quickly. And the resonance of trusted third-party sources and the character of content is … reassuring.

“We … demonstrate empirically how factors such as user activity and number of followers do not contribute strongly to trend creation and its propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the content with the users of the social network plays a major role in causing trends,” the study says.

HP research shows mainstream media drive Twitter ‘trends’ to a surprising degree [Data Central, The Official HP Blog]

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