A new study claims it can predict the popularity of a news story on Twitter with an 84 percent accuracy rate by looking solely at four factors that affect content.
The study, led by Bernardo Huberman of the Social Computing Lab Group at the Palo Alto-based HP Labs, examined the content of an article before it was published in determining how popular it would be on Twitter.
Specifically, the authors looked at:
- The news source that generates and posts the article;
- The category of news the article falls under;
- The subjectivity of the language in the article;
- The people and things mentioned in the article.
“Our results show that while these features may not be sufficient to predict the exact number of tweets that an article will garner, they can be effective in providing a range of popularity for the article on Twitter,” Huberman wrote in the study. “We achieved an overall accuracy of 84% using classifiers.”
The study, however, raises a lot of questions for journalists. Read more