Modeling Twitter Engagement in Real-World Events

Twitter offers tremendous opportunities for people to engage with real-world events (e.g., political election) through information sharing and communicating about these events. However, little is understood about the factors that affect people’s Twitter engagement (e.g., posting) in such real-world events. This paper examines multiple predictive factors associated with four different perspectives of users’ Twitter engagement, and quantify their potential influence on predicting the (i) presence; and (ii) degree of the user’s engagement with real-world events. We find that the measures of people’s prior Twitter activities, topical interests, geolocation, and social network structures are all variously correlated to their engagement with real-world events.