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Social Network Analysis and Mining
Published in:

01-12-2016 | Original Article

Hashtags and followers

An experimental study of the online social network Twitter

Authors: Eva García Martín, Niklas Lavesson, Mina Doroud

Published in: Social Network Analysis and Mining | Issue 1/2016

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Abstract

We have conducted an analysis of data from 502,891 Twitter users and focused on investigating the potential correlation between hashtags and the increase of followers to determine whether the addition of hashtags to tweets produces new followers. We have designed an experiment with two groups of users: one tweeting with random hashtags and one tweeting without hashtags. The results showed that there is a correlation between hashtags and followers: on average, users tweeting with hashtags increased their followers by 2.88, while users tweeting without hashtags increased 0.88 followers. We present a simple, reproducible approach to extract and analyze Twitter user data for this and similar purposes.
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Metadata
Title
Hashtags and followers
An experimental study of the online social network Twitter
Authors
Eva García Martín
Niklas Lavesson
Mina Doroud
Publication date
01-12-2016
Publisher
Springer Vienna
Published in
Social Network Analysis and Mining / Issue 1/2016
Print ISSN: 1869-5450
Electronic ISSN: 1869-5469
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-016-0320-6

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