A Longitudinal Study of Follow Predictors on Twitter C.J. Hutto Sarita Yardi Eric Gilbert School of Interactive Computing School of Information School of Interactive Computing Georgia Institute of Technology University of Michigan Georgia Institute of Technology
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT ness; and profile completeness [30]. We also assessed nu- Follower count is important to Twitter users: it can indicate merous attributes specific to the content of users’ tweets, popularity and prestige. Yet, holistically, little is understood such as: propensity to express positive versus negative sen- about what factors – like social behavior, message content, timent [26,37]; topical focus [40]; proportions of tweets and network structure – lead to more followers. Such in- with “meformer” content versus informational content [33]; formation could help technologists design and build tools frequency of others “retweeting” a user’s content [5]; lin- that help users grow their audiences. In this paper, we study guistic sophistication (reading difficulty) of tweets; and 507 Twitter users and a half-million of their tweets over 15 hashtag usage. Finally, we evaluated the impact of users’ months. Marrying a longitudinal approach with a negative evolving social network structure, collecting snapshots of binomial auto-regression model, we find that variables for their friends and followers every three months for fifteen message content, social behavior, and network structure should be given equal consideration when predicting link months. With this, we can evaluate the effects of network formations on Twitter. To our knowledge, this is the first status, reciprocity [18], and common network neighbors. longitudinal study of follow predictors, and the first to show Our variables were selected from prominent theoretical that the relative contributions of social behavior and mes- constructs bridging social science, linguistics, computer sage content are just as impactful as factors related to social mediated communications, and network theory.