Celebrity Tweet Go Viral ? An Investigation of Retweets

Celebrities have some of the largest followings on Twitter, and their fans increasingly use Twitter as a way to engage and extend celebrities’ reach. We examine retweeting, specifically, and analyze the features of celebrity tweets that predict whether it will be widely retweeted by followers. We used both multiple regression and classification approaches and found that the number of followers of a celebrity tweeter is the highest predictor of whether a tweet will be retweeted at high volume. Multiple linear regression was unable to pinpoint exactly when a tweet becomes successful but using a Generalized Liner Models classification function, we are able to predict whether a tweet will go viral with 78% prediction accuracy compared with a 66% baseline. We explain these computational approaches to analyzing millions of retweets and discuss the implications of this retweeting activity. Previous work has been done on which tweets are retweeted in the Twitter social networking space [17][18][16][11][5]. There have been some small scale studies examining celebrities retweeting behavior, but to our knowledge there have been no large scale studies. In fact large scale studies have not focused on celebrities, but instead have focused on behavior of non-celebrity tweeters. Social Media outlets, such as twitter, has fundamentally changed the way in which celebrities and their fans interact. In the past, celebrities spoke through public relations firms, and their message was highly regulated. With the advent of social media, celebrities now regularly address and interact with their fans in a more personal manner. When examining celebrity tweets, our two fundamental research questions were Which tweets are retweeted more than others? and What do these retweets, if anything, have in common? Therefore, the goal of this paper is to illuminate features of celebrity tweets that are widely retweeted in order to understand what influences whether a celebrity’s comments will reach larger audiences. We examine retweets of celebrities’ tweets for two primary reasons. First, as offline celebrities’ social media audiences (and potential to influence) grow, it is important to understand what influences whether their messages are passed on. Second, as more scholars study celebrity-fan interactions, it is useful to identify what, if anything, about celebrity twitter accounts or celebrities’ tweets influence whether users will interact in the form of retweeting. 1 Related Work 1.1 Celebrities, Fans, and Twitter Twitter provides a unique kind of conversational space that is at once both public and personal. Users’ tweets are public, in that anyone can read them, and personal in that the message can be directed at a person or group or contain personal content. Twitter also allows one-way, unreciprocated connections enabling users to view messages from people who don’t view messages from them. Most celebrities follow far fewer accounts than they have followers, suggesting that they are taking advantage of the non-reciprocal connections Twitter allows. This kind of one-sided relationship is a hallmark of parasocial interaction [1][8], the kind of relationship a media user develops with a media figure. Scholars have recently begun to examine parasocial interaction in social media among fans and sports figures [10], celebrities [12] and musicians [2]. Celebrities are the most-mentioned and most-retweeted users on Twitter [5] and have tremendous opportunity to influence what gets talked about. 1.2 Why Tweeters Reweet Findings from Boyd’s [3] work suggest that people retweet to amplify or spread retweets to new audiences, to inform a specific audience, to comment on someone else’s tweet, to make their presence as a listener visible, to agree with another twitter user, to validate their and other’s thoughts, as an act of friendship or loyalty, and for self gain. Macskassy and Michelson [11] found that users are more likely to retweet content from someone they have talked to or about recently, a topic they often tweet about, or a user to whom they are similar. Yang et al [18], find that though some properties of tweets predict whether a tweet will be retweeted extensively, the most accurate predictor of whether the tweet will be retweeted is how often the original tweeter is mentioned on twitter in general. That is, the tweeters popularity, as measured by mentions, is the greatest predictor of whether his or her tweets will be retweeted to a great extent. Conversely, Cha, et al, [5] do not specifically look at why tweets are retweeted, but rather examine how to measure how influential a twitter user is, that is how to predict which tweets will go vital, when the only information we have is who is the originator of the tweet. They find that retweets are not driven by the number of followers a user has, so conclude that retweets must have something to do with the content value of the tweet itself. However they find that the top influentials were recognizable public figure i.e. celebrities.