Estimating the Spreading of Viral Threads on Twitter

Microblogging and social news web sites like Twitter are largely used as an important source of up-to-date information. Consequently, organizations and firms have interest in using those platforms to di↵use their own news and updates. The dynamics of information or rumor spread in online social networks depends mainly on network characteristics and is currently a critical topic in Social Network Analysis (SNA). The di↵usion through ‘retweets’ of such information occurs in a time lapse immediately after the publication of the original tweet, and it is internal to some hashtag-based ‘channel’. In this study, the retweet count of a given tweet is assumed as an index of its di↵usion. For analyzing the statistical features of viral tweets, we have selected five tweets. Our model is based on the hypothesis that it is highly probable that a user decides to retweet a tweet if he/she is following either the tweet author, or another retweeter of the tweet. Therefore, we choose as main features of a tweet its number of retweets and the number of followers of retweeting users.