Towards modeling popularity of microblogs

As one kind of social media, microblogs are widely used for sensing the real-world. The popularity of microblogs is an important measurement for evaluation of the influencial of pieces of information. The models and modeling techniques for popularity of microblogs are studied in this paper. A huge data set based on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging services, is used in the study. First, two different types of popularity, namely number of retweets and number of possible views are defined, while their relationships are discussed. Then, the temporal dynamics, including lifecycles and tipping-points, of tweets' popularity are studied. For modeling the temporal dynamics, a piecewise sigmoid model is used. Empirical studies show the effectiveness of our modeling methods.