Publications

Hashtags on Twitter are used to make groups, initiate conversational subjects, share life events and post personal experiences. Due to the enormous growth of social media networks, researchers conducted many studies on the evolution of groups on such networks to predict how they retain their members, attract new ones and grow over time. In this study, we focus on the factors causing people to participate in Twitter hashtags, which in turn affects the evolution of these hashtags. In order to study this evolution, a dataset of some Twitter hashtags related to career opportunities was collected for a period of two months between February and March 2016. The collected dataset allowed us to study the reciprocal effect of the users’ topological features and their activity levels. In this paper, three new measures are introduced (two influence measures and one topological measure). Those measures, in addition to the measures available in the literature, are used to spot the measures that can be used for influencing a user to attract other users to a certain hashtag.