Life and Death of Tweets Not so Random After All

MIT Technology Review: “MIT assistant professor Tauhid Zaman and two other researchers (Emily Fox at the University of Washington and Eric Bradlow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School) have come up with a model that can predict how many times a tweet will ultimately be retweeted, minutes after it is posted. The model was created by collecting retweets on a slew of topics and looking at the time when the original tweet was posted and how fast it spread. That provided knowledge used to predict how popular a new tweet will be by looking at how many times it was retweeted shortly after it was first posted.
The researchers’ findings were explained in a paper submitted to the Annals of Applied Statistics. In the paper, the authors note that “understanding retweet behavior could lead to a better understanding of how broader ideas spread in Twitter and in other social networks,” and such data may be helpful in a number of areas, like marketing and political campaigning.
You can check out the model here.”