Xiong and Liu discovered that public opinion on Twitter often evolves rapidly and levels off quickly into an ordered state in which one opinion remains dominant.

In true social media form, this consensus is often driven by the endorsements of larger and larger groups, which tend to have the most influence.

The work also revealed that when dominant opinions emerge, however, they tend not to achieve complete consensus.

In fact, Xiong said, when Twitter users who hold minority views are faced with overwhelming opposition, they are still not likely to change their opinions.

Since public opinion levels off and evolves into an ordered state within a short time, small advantages of one opinion in the early stages can turn into a bigger advantage during the evolution of public opinion, Xiong said.

While the study was done more than two years ago, and there are more Twitter users now, the researchers believe that the results would still be similar if done on a new dataset today.

Xiong and Liu said the analysis might be improved by integrating new algorithms that analyze the sentiment of the messages.

Xiong envisions that political candidates and large companies may benefit from applying this work toward developing "network applications" that would move beyond simply collecting and analyzing users' opinions and allow them to develop and test hypotheses about what really works.

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