Analyzing User Retweet Behavior on Twitter

This paper provides a deep analysis of user retweet behavior on Twitter. While previous works about analyzing retweet have mainly focused on predicting the retweetability of each tweet, they lacked interpretations at an individual level. In this paper, we perform a general analysis of retweet behavior from the perspective of individual users. Specifically, we train a prediction model to forecast whether a tweet will be retweeted by a given user, leveraging four different types of features: social-based, content-based, tweet-based and author-based features. By performing “leave-one-feature-out” comparisons, we identify factors that are strongly associated with user retweet behavior.