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Free keywords:
cs.SI,Computer Science, Computers and Society, cs.CY, Physics, Physics and Society, physics.soc-ph
Abstract:
On social media platforms, like Twitter, users are often interested in
gaining more influence and popularity by growing their set of followers, aka
their audience. Several studies have described the properties of users on
Twitter based on static snapshots of their follower network. Other studies have
analyzed the general process of link formation. Here, rather than investigating
the dynamics of this process itself, we study how the characteristics of the
audience and follower links change as the audience of a user grows in size on
the road to user's popularity.
To begin with, we find that the early followers tend to be more elite users
than the late followers, i.e., they are more likely to have verified and expert
accounts. Moreover, the early followers are significantly more similar to the
person that they follow than the late followers. Namely, they are more likely
to share time zone, language, and topics of interests with the followed user.
To some extent, these phenomena are related with the growth of Twitter itself,
wherein the early followers tend to be the early adopters of Twitter, while the
late followers are late adopters. We isolate, however, the effect of the growth
of audiences consisting of followers from the growth of Twitter's user base
itself. Finally, we measure the engagement of such audiences with the content
of the followed user, by measuring the probability that an early or late
follower becomes a retweeter.
