Lifetime of tweets: a statistical analysis

Abstract

Social media has become such a large part of people’s life that even if little at a time, that influence can accommodate over time and can manipulate or even form new opinions. The authors have gathered data with which it is easily understood that the growth of Twitter, the people within its engagement range and its potential for becoming a portal of information sourcing as well as incidents have grown considerably well over the last decade and are well expected to grow into the next decade as well due to the new generation telecom technologies. This study aims to understand how much time Twitter trends remain ‘hot’ based on various parameters including but not limited to demography, the incident, time period or the people affected.The main objective is to gather data about different trending topics over different time periods and then analyze the pattern of how tweet volume due to that Twitter trend increased or decreased over a few days. This allows to demonstrate that Twitter can be a powerful tool to manipulate public opinion since this reaches a large number of users in a lot of developed countries. The influence of tweets can be seen from the fact that even a tweet done from a non-influential person’s account can garner enough attention to become worldwide phenomenon. Towards the end of the study, the authors used a visual medium to depict how various topics fared over the 5 days that tweets were scraped.