[Air-L] Locating passive consumers on social network sites

[Maya Yuan]

Hi everyone,
I’m doing a project that focuses on how people consume and respond to
political content on a Twitter-like social network site. I was
planning to target both active people who are highly interested in
these contents, showing by posting comments (I actually found this
group of people via reading the comments they posted on) or re-sending
them; and passive consumers, who basically only read these contents.
The problem is, it is hard to reach these passive population on a
social network site. Does anyone have tips on locating these people or
any literature about this question?
Many thanks.

Mengyao Yuan
PhD student of sociology  University of Edinburgh
Email: maya.yuan2010 at gmail.com