Why do you spread this message? Understanding users sentiment in social media campaigns

Abstract

Twitter has been increasingly used for spreading messages about campaigns. Such campaigns try to gain followers through their Twitter accounts, influence the followers and spread messages through them. In this paper, we explore the relationship between followers' sentiment towards the campaign topic and their rate of retweeting of messages generated by the campaign. Our analysis with followers of multiple social-media campaigns found statistical significant correlations between such sentiment and retweeting rate. Based on our analysis, we have conducted an online intervention study among the followers of different social-media campaigns. Our study shows that targeting followers based on their sentiment towards the campaign can give higher retweet rate than a number of other baseline approaches.