Confirmatory Analysis on Influencing Factors When Mention Users in Twitter

Nowadays, Twitter has become an important platform to expand the diffusion of information or advertisement. Mention is a new feature on Twitter. By mentioning users in a tweet, they will receive notifications and their possible retweets may help to initiate large cascade diffusion of the tweet. To enhance a tweet’s diffusion by finding the right persons to mention, in this paper, we propose three factors that probably have impact on tweet’s diffusion. Specifically, these factors are user vulnerability, user’s online status and spatial location. In this paper, the issue ‘whom to mention when tweeting’ is transformed to the issue ‘choosing users who have higher probability to retweet. By analyzing users retweet behaviors, online status and users’ location in Twitter, we confirm these three factors. Experiments were conducted on a real dataset from Twitter containing about 49,253 users and 563,758 tweets in a target community, and results show that these three factors all have significant impacts on retweeting and information diffusion.