Measuring popularity from Twitter

Farideh Tavazoee

;Claudio Conversano;Francesco Mola

2017-01-01

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Abstract

Measuring popularity from social media has been explored about a decade. Twitter is an influential social media in which users mark a tweet as popular either by selecting it as favorite or forwarding the tweet to others by retweeting it. Understanding this popularity is really beneficial in different domains as it can help to draw a relationship between a Twitter account and its followers. In this study, we assess the strength of this relationship for the 2016 US election case by analyzing candidates’ tweets and the amount of favorites they have received. More specifically, we present an approach to measure the popularity of candidates based on their style of tweeting. We show how measuring the popularity of candidates’ tweets can reveal the amount of efforts they put on their tweets to attract more people and consequently increase their chances to win the election.