Will This 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.