Are you more likely to be ignored on social networking site Twitter if you’re not considered powerful or influential? Social media expert Julie Posetti certainly thinks so.

Posetti has noted a tendency among some Twitter users to avoid interaction with those who are not well known or lack a large band of followers — a phenomenon she’s named “uptweeting”.

“My impression is that there is an emerging hierarchy on Twitter,” says Posetti, who regularly provides social media training to professional journalists.

“Some people seem to have difficulty with reflecting the egalitarianism that was originally touted as the major appeal of Twitter – of Twitter as an equalizer.”

Posetti’s interest in the topic was sparked by a conversation with a friend who was wondering why his questions and comments were being routinely ignored by otherwise active Twitter users. Initially sceptical about whether her friend was being over-sensitive, she asked her 8000+ Twitter followers whether they had been victims of “uptweeting”.

“There was an almost unanimous, ‘Yes, I have experienced that’,” she says.

Here’s a sample of some of the responses:

@KristinaKukolja: for some “tweeting up” offers a form of validation, I’d say, especially by members of perceived “elite” twitter cliques

@Tzarimas: Agreed – there’s a lot of that. I think some is in the hope of an RT [Retweet].

@mattdesilva: It’s the schoolyard hierarchy in play, an inbuilt response to a social situation. We can’t help but make pyramids.

@bronwen: If people are using Twitter as a “social climbing service” then they’re missing its richness.

Posetti openly acknowledges that her research is far from scientific – and that people with lots of followers cannot respond to all tweets because of work and personal commitments. Uptweeting, she adds, is often subconscious.

But she says it’s worth remembering that, for some, “there is a feeling of isolation in a hyper-connected space”.

And she warns that journalists, in particular, will not use get as much out of Twitter as they should unless they engage with the general public: “It’s supposed to be a conversation,” she says.