Mysterious Influential Users in Political Communication on Twitter: Users’ Occupation Information and Its Impact on Retweetability

This study attempts to examine the effect of user’s self-disclosed identification to measure his influence and activity on Twitter. By looking at the most frequently shared top 1076 tweets written by 250 users during the 2012 presidential election campaign South Korea, we particularly examine the relation between user’s occupation information and the measures of his ‘influence’: the number of followers and number of retweets by others. Influential users in South Korean political communication network on Twitter are classified as one group with self-disclosed occupation information and the other group without that information. User’s occupation information clearly shows the impact on the number of followers for both groups. On the other hand, user group without self-disclosed occupation information has a higher level of producing influential political tweets and wide retweetability over the other group, regardless the small number of followers. It suggests that further study needs to identify other variables that may influence particular user or tweet’s retweetability as an indicator of influence.