Why You Are More Engaged: Factors Influencing Twitter Engagement in Occupy Wall Street

Abstract

Twitter has been used for engaging with audiences online in several popular political movements. In this paper we explore factors that influence the engagement of Twitter users during the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, where engagement is measured by retweets and hashtag usage related to the movement. Through analyzing Twitter activities of more than 18,000 users, we found that users’ general activity level, geographic location, topic interests and interpersonal interactions before the movement all had measurable effects on users’ engagement level during the movement.