Who Are My Audiences? A Study of the Evolution of Target Audiences in Microblogs

User behavior in online social media is not static, it evolves through the years. In Twitter, we have witnessed a maturation of its platform and its users due to endogenous and exogenous reasons. While the research using Twitter data has expanded rapidly, little work has studied the change/evolution in the Twitter ecosystem itself. In this paper, we use a taxonomy of the types of tweets posted by around 4M users during 10 weeks in 2011 and 2013. We classify users according to their tweeting behavior, and find 5 clusters for which we can associate a different dominant tweeting type. Furthermore, we observe the evolution of users across groups between 2011 and 2013 and find interesting insights such as the decrease in conversations and increase in URLs sharing. Our findings suggest that mature users evolve to adopt Twitter as a news media rather than a social network.