The Secret Science of Retweets

What makes somebody retweet information from a stranger? That’s the question addressed by Kyumin Lee from Utah State University in Logan and a few pals from IBM’s Almaden research center in San Jose.

These guys say that by studying the characteristics of Twitter users, it is possible to identify strangers who are more likely to pass on your message than others. And in doing this, the researchers say they’ve been able to improve the retweet rate of messages sent strangers by up to 680 percent. So how did they do it?