Evolution of hashtags on twitter: A case study from events groups

Abstract

Twitter is a micro-blogging interactive platform that captured fame due to its simple features that allowed the communication between users. As the interactive communication grew bigger and faster, a feature called Hashtags became very known, famous and recognized by most of users as it acquainted the themes behind the posted tweets. This study focuses on the factors causing people to participate on some trendy hashtags on Twitter online social network. Consequently, these factors affect the evolution of such trendy hashtags over time. In order to study this evolution, a dataset reflecting real tweets from common events occurring between December 2015 and January 2016 were crawled. The reciprocal effect of users’ topological features and activity levels has been studied. Two Influence Measures and one Topological Measure have been introduced in this work. Moreover, other measures available in the literature such as Activity Measures and Centrality Measures have been used. These measures, along with the three newly introduced measures contributed in the determination of the measures that might be influential for a user to attract other users to a certain hashtag. In this work, the focus is on the centrality levels in addition to the activity levels of users participating on the hashtags under study and the effect of those levels on the activity or the membership of other users on same hashtags.