"Low Frequency Tweeters Have More to Say!" A New Approach to Identify Importance of Tweets

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms.With a large number of tweets, the activity feed of users becomes noisy, challenging to read, and most importantly tweets often get lost. We present a new approach to personalise the ranking of the tweets toward solving the problem of information overload which is achieved by analysing the relationship between the importance of tweets to the frequency at which the author tweets. The hypothesis tested is that "low-frequency tweeters have more to say", i.e. if a user who tweets infrequently actually goes to the effort of tweeting, then it is more likely to be of more importance or contain more "meaning" than a tweet by a user who tweets continuously. We propose six new measures to evaluate the importance of tweets based on the ability of the tweet to drive interaction among its readers, which is measured through metrics such as retweets, favourites, and comments, and the extent of the author's network interacting with the tweet. Our study shows that users who tweeted less than ten tweets per week were more likely to be perceived as important by their followers and have the most important messages. This identified tweet-frequency band could be used to reorder the activity feed of users and such reordering would ensure the messages of low-frequency tweeters do not get lost in the stream of tweets. This could also serve as a scoring index for Twitter users to identify users frequently tweeting important messages.