Trends in Social Media : Persistence and Decay

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation, persistence, and decay of social media trends, especially on Twitter, highlighting the importance of content resonance over user activity or follower count.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical framework for understanding trend dynamics and empirically shows content resonance as a key factor in trend propagation.

Findings

User activity and follower count have limited impact on trend formation.

Content resonance significantly influences trend persistence.

The study offers a theoretical basis for trend dynamics in social media.

Abstract

Social media generates a prodigious wealth of real-time content at an incessant rate. From all the content that people create and share, only a few topics manage to attract enough attention to rise to the top and become temporal trends which are displayed to users. The question of what factors cause the formation and persistence of trends is an important one that has not been answered yet. In this paper, we conduct an intensive study of trending topics on Twitter and provide a theoretical basis for the formation, persistence and decay of trends. We also demonstrate empirically how factors such as user activity and number of followers do not contribute strongly to trend creation and its propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the content with the users of the social network plays a major role in causing trends.