Presented at SocialCom 2010 conference Aug 21st 2010

1. Want to be Retweeted?Large Scale Analytics on Factors Impacting Retweet Rate in Twitter Network Bongwon Suh, Lichan Hong, Peter Pirolli, and Ed Chi suh@parc.com @billsuh Augmented Social Cognition Research Group (Xerox) PARC

2. Research Motivation How and why certain information spreads more widely than others in Twitter network?

3. Followee and Follower

4. Retweet and Information Diffusion Kwak et al. WWW10

5. How to Retweet Old Style

6. How to Retweet New Style Feature Retweet

7. Research Question Which tweet features are associated with retweet? Retweet Model # Retweet ~ function(f1, f2, …., fn), where fiare simple features extracted from a tweet Data Driven

8. Features of Tweets Content features URL Hashtag Mention Contextual features # of followers # of followees Account seniority (days) # of past tweets (or statuses) # of favorite items Retweet E.g. Feature retweet, RT: @username, Via: @username, etc Image: http://astore.amazon.com/buy.victorinox.swiss.army.knives-20/

9. Example Tweet Content Features Mention Hashtag URL # Followees: 395 # Followers: 1,400 # Favorite: 1,657 # Day: (since June 17, 2008) # Past tweets: 21,000 Contextual Features User “shefaly” (through Twitter API)

10. Data Collection 74M tweets from Twitter Stream API Characterization 2~3 % sample Incomplete retweet information 10K tweets with accurate # of retweets for each of them Hadoop / Hbase / MapReduce Image: http://covers.oreilly.com/images/9780596154622/lrg.jpg

11. Two Analyses Exploratory Analysis Principle component analysis (PCA) Retweet + 8 features Examine how they are related Retweet Model Generalized Linear Model (GLM) # retweets as a linear sum of function(feature)

12. PCA Factor Map Content Factor

13. PCA Factor Map Content Factor Contextual Factor

14. PCA Factor Map Content Factor Contextual Factor

15. Generalized Linear Model Content Features Contextual Features

16. OK. Having URL matters… Then? All of them are equal? What kind of content do people use? Does retweeting vary depending on types of information? Further analysis Content features Contextual features Image: http://techfilipino.com/how-much-is-my-website-domain-name

17. Calculating Retweet Rate for Domain Group URLs by domain 475,509 tweets have URLs from www.youtube.com (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyz1234) Unshortening 15.6M+ URLs! Identify retweets 79,404 of them are in retweets. Reweet Rate for Youtube.com 79,404 (in retweets) / 475,509 (in all tweets) = 16.6%

18. Normalized Retweet Rate Relative ratio of retweet rate compared to the global average Global Average Retweet Rate 8.24M total retweet 73.9M total tweet 11.2% = 8.24M / 73.9M Retweetablity Normalized retweet rate for a domain Retweet rate for youtube.com: 16.6% Youtube.com: 1.50 = 16.6% / 11.2%

19. URL vs. Retweet Rate twitlonger.com Normalized Retweet Rate mashable.com huffingtonpost.com guardian.co.uk techcrunch.com cnn.com nytimes.com twitter.com twitpic.com Popularity Rank formspring.me twitcam.com fun140.com foursquare.com tweetmyjobs.com

20. Varying Retweet Rate per Domain Type Personal media ( < 0.15) Justin.tv twitcam.com Trivia & Discovery ( > 4.0) Omg-facts.com Holykaw.alltop.com News media with High Retweet Rate ( > 2.5) Mashable.com TheOnion.com NYTimes.com News Aggregator ( < 0.6) news.yahoo.com news.google.com

21. Hashtag vs. Retweet Rate #vouconfessarque Normalized Retweet Rate #idothat2 #jafizisso #ohjustlikeme #retweetthisif #terremotechile #iranelection #haiti #quote #tcot #followfriday #ff #fail #nowplaying Popularity Rank #jobs #tinychat #fb

22. Patterns in Hashtag Personal media #nowplaying: 0.75 Social meme #idothat2: 7.6 #ohjustlikeme: 7.3 #fail: 1.78 #haiti: 4.3 #iranelection: 4.0 #tcot: 3.5 Being Social #ff: 2.5, #followfriday:2.5, #follow: 3.0 Spam / Robots #epicpetwars : 0.002 #tinychat: 0.03 #tweetmyjobs: 0.05

23. Retweet Rate vs. Contextual Features # of followers # of followees Account seniority (days) # of past tweets (or statuses) # of favorite items

24. Follower vs. Retweet Rate Normalized Retweet Rate # of Follower

25. Followee vs. Retweet Rate Normalized Retweet Rate # of Followee

26. Age of Twitter Account vs. Retweet Rate Normalized Retweet Rate Days

27. Past Tweets vs. Retweet Rate Normalized Retweet Rate # of Past Tweet

28. Want to be Retweeted - Summary Content URL, Hashtag Context More # of followers, make many friends Implication Be an interesting person! Up-to-date, opinionated, insightful, serendipitous, and/or funny information

29. Thank You! Want to be Retweeted?Large Scale Analytics on Factors Impacting Retweet Rate in Twitter Network Bongwon Suh, Lichan Hong, Peter Pirolli, and Ed Chi suh@parc.com @billsuh Augmented Social Cognition Research Group

31. Extra Slides

32. Retweet Rate for URL Domain

33. Retweet Rate for Hashtag