How to Become Famous in the Microblog World

Microblogging services are a social media platform in which users post their current states as a short text, similar to instant messaging (IM). Recently, microblogging services, including Twitter, have become extremely popular. Concomitantly with the growth of Twitter, several companies have begun to use Twitter as business tools. Some companies have succeeded in increasing sales. However, most companies are troubled at how to use Twitter and how to win popularity in the Twitter milieu. As described herein, we analyze how the number of followers changes in a certain period and determine which parameters dominate popularity in the Twitter world. We also classify Twitter users into groups based on social tagging and propose methods to become popular when using microblogging services. Introduction Social media have reached the masses and have become irreplaceable in daily life and business situations. ”Social media” are media that general users generate and broadcast the contents of. Among all kinds of social network services, microblogging services, including Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce, have become extremely popular in the past several years. Microblogging services are called ”real-time blog services”, in which users post a message about their current state in short text form, say within 140–200 characters, as in instant messaging (IM). The number of unique Twitter users has increased rapidly. Figure 1 displays the number of Twitter unique visitors. This increasing tendency is expected to continue through the next several years. Recently, the number of corporate accounts as well as those of individual users has been increasing. They want to use Twitter to increase their sales figures, to communicate with their customers, and to boost their reputation. Several companies achieved success in increasing sales figures using Twitter. However, most companies are fumbling at how to use Twitter for business. For companies or users who seek to broadcast information about themselves to many people, the most important thing is to become popular in the Twitter world. Many studies of how to calculate the importance of Web pages have been done. The most famous method Figure 1: Twitter’s unique visitor number (Alney 2009) is PageRank, invented by Larry Page and applied by google.com(Page et al. 1999). In addition, methods for ranking information and pages in search engines, so-called called ”Search Engine Optimization,” are well established these days. In the Twitter world, we can know easily how important a user is, different from the Web. ”follower counts” show how important accounts are in the Twitter world. If a user starts to Follow another user, then the user is inferred to be interested in the second user. For that reason, the simple count of followers can be treated as the popularity of a user. In fact, when we seek a useful user, we use follower counts as clues to discern how popular a user is. It is important to know how to increase the number of followers. Nevertheless, such methods have never been established; no studies in the related literature describe such methods. As described herein, we assess and report which feature quantities are more effective to become popular in the Twitter world. • define the follower count as the popularity in the Twitter world. • investigate users whose follower counts increase rapidly. • calculate various amounts of them and which indices correlate strongly with the follower count. In the section ”feature quantities of Twitter”, we explain functions of Twitter and list feature quantities adopted in this paper. In the ”Experiments” section, we present our experiments and discuss the results. In the ”Conclusion” section, we conclude this paper. Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. 323 Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media