Who pushes the discussion on wind energy? An analysis of self-reposting behaviour on Twitter

Abstract

Discussions about wind energy and its environmental impact take place routinely over Twitter. Twitterers with a strong interest in the matter may also retweet their own tweets (aka self-reposting) as a means to increase their visibility and push their message across. Identifying the features that make self-reposted tweets different from tweets that are not retweeted (either by their originators or by other twitterers) is crucial to understand what drives self-reposting. In this paper, we examine several characteristics of self-reposted tweets, concerning when they occur, how frequently, their length, and the number of hashtags, hyperlinks, and exclamation points they contain. We conduct our analysis on a dataset comprising tweets about wind energy. We find out that: (a) twitterers repost their own tweets primarily on weekends (especially on Sundays) and in the afternoon; (b) self-reposted tweets tend to be longer and contain more hashtags; (c) self-reposting typically occurs when retweets by other twitterers become less frequent, probably driven by the need to refresh the message. Finally, we also observe that self-reposting is resorted to mostly by individual twitterers rather than companies.