Will My Followers Tweet? Predicting Twitter Engagement using Machine Learning

Abstract: Managers who are able to understand how social media is evolving first have an advantage over those who are slower to understand what their followers are doing. Despite the advantage such knowledge would bring, user predictability in social media is not well understood. We use two different machine learning methods to model the behavior of 15,000 users on the basis of their past behavior during a seven-week period. We demonstrate that the behavior of users on Twitter can be well modeled as processes with self-feedback. We also explore how different structural segments of Twitter users behave differently. These insights would enable differential targeting schemes that might increase customer engagement with disparate groups of Twitter followers.