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Data Mining Reveals How Wording Influences Tweet Propagation
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "One of the most widely shared tweets in history is Obama's "Four more years", posted after his second presidential election victory and currently retweeted 775,000 times. But how would different wording have influenced this tweet's popularity and the way it spread? It's easy to imagine that there's no way of telling what might have been in such an alternative universe. But a surprising phenomenon on Twitter has allowed data scientists to study this kind of alternative reality and work out the factors that make one tweet more popular than another. It turns out that the twitter stream contains a surprisingly large number of tweets from the same authors, pointing to the same content but with different messages. That's a natural experiment in which factors such as the author, the URL, the number of followers and so on are all held constant while the message varies. By studying these pairs of tweets, researchers can measure how well each performs and then determine which factors contribute to their popularity. These turn out to be things like the amount of information the tweet contains, the language it uses and even whether it includes a request for a retweet. The team has developed an algorithm that predicts which of a pair of tweets is more likely to be successful with greater accuracy than humans. And they've even set up a website where anybody can test their tweet-rating ability and thereby improve their chances of writing the perfect tweet."
"Four years, more please"
"assert(sqrt(16));"
"remember when i killed an american in yemen because i can?"
"Guantanamo...why does that sound familiar"
"If uncle Joe says OK i guess gays are maybe kinda ok."
"I swear to god if i hear benghazi one more time..."
"I can haz budget?"
Good people go to bed earlier.
As a Social Media Strategy consultant, this information is very useful to me. I will study it closely.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The twitter stream
a frog tumblr
the sound of retweets
There's another value of this research: if you take the test, you can see how attuned you are to social media (group) thinking. I took the test and selected answers that I genuinely thought were more interesting for retweeting, and I got success rate of less than 30% -- worse than chance. That tells me if I had to do a social marketing campaign, I better not do it myself.
Click on the ad to see the trick they don't want you to know about...
I think some of the stuff works. But many Hollywood films fail because the people making them don't care or have other agendas. Many movie makers live in a "different world" and are not in touch - for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There are formulas and critics say too many movies nowadays are following the same formulas too strictly. http://www.slate.com/articles/...
It's not necessary to follow the formula that strictly for success: http://www.savethecat.com/beat...
(I also suspect movie makers in other places have different styles - Hong Kong, Bollywood)
But hey it works and most people won't care if most movies start following some formulaic structure. People will care if some idiot produces a superman movie where superman never flies.
Basically, a famous person can write anything and it will be retweeted. An unknown person can write the same tweet and it will be ignored.
Link to paper:
Sasa Petrovic, Miles Osborne and Victor Lavrenko. RT to win! Predicting Message Propagation in Twitter. ICWSM, Barcelona, Spain. July 2011. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/...