Why Are You More Engaged? Predicting Social Engagement from Word Use
This work addresses social media engagement prediction for researchers and platforms, but it is incremental as it applies existing psycholinguistic methods to Twitter data.
The study tackled predicting social engagement behaviors like replies and retweets on Twitter by analyzing word use, finding significant correlations with psycholinguistic categories and building predictive models that achieved reasonable accuracy.
We present a study to analyze how word use can predict social engagement behaviors such as replies and retweets in Twitter. We compute psycholinguistic category scores from word usage, and investigate how people with different scores exhibited different reply and retweet behaviors on Twitter. We also found psycholinguistic categories that show significant correlations with such social engagement behaviors. In addition, we have built predictive models of replies and retweets from such psycholinguistic category based features. Our experiments using a real world dataset collected from Twitter validates that such predictions can be done with reasonable accuracy.