Investigating the relationship between tweeting style and popularity: The case of US presidential election 2016

Abstract

Predicting popularity from social media has been explored about a decade. As far as the number of social media users is soaring, understanding the relationship between popularity and social media is really beneficial because it can be mapped to the real popularity of an entity. The popularity in social media, for instance in Twitter, is interpreted by drawing a relationship between a social media account and its followers. Therefore, in this paper, to understand the popularity of candidates of the US election 2016 in social media, we verify this association in Twitter by analyzing the candidates’ tweets. More specifically, our aim is to assess if candidates put efforts to improve their style of tweeting over time to be more favorable to their followers. We show that Mr. Trump could wisely exploit Twitter to attract more people by tweeting in a well-organized and desirable manner and that tweeting style has increased his popularity in social media.