Title: What Propels Celebrity Follower Counts? Language Use or Social Connectivity,
Abstract: Follower count is a factor that quantifies the popularity of celebrities. It
is a reflection of their power, prestige and overall social reach. In this
paper we investigate whether the social connectivity or the language choice is
more correlated to the future follower count of a celebrity. We collect data
about tweets, retweets and mentions of 471 Indian celebrities with verified
Twitter accounts. We build two novel networks to approximate social
connectivity of the celebrities. We study various structural properties of
these two networks and observe their correlations with future follower counts.
In parallel, we analyze the linguistic structure of the tweets (LIWC features,
syntax and sentiment features and style and readability features) and observe
the correlations of each of these with the future follower count of a
celebrity. As a final step we use there features to classify a celebrity in a
specific bucket of future follower count (HIGH, MID or LOW). We observe that
the network features alone achieve an accuracy of 0.52 while the linguistic
features alone achieve an accuracy of 0.69 grossly outperforming the network
features. The network and linguistic features in conjunction produce an
accuracy of 0.76. We also discuss some final insights that we obtain from
further data analysis celebrities with larger follower counts post tweets that
have (i) more words from friend and family LIWC categories, (ii) more positive
sentiment laden words, (iii) have better language constructs and are (iv) more
readable.