Hashtags and followers An experimental study of the online social network Twitter
In this thesis we have conducted a statistical analysis of the online social network Twitter. Specifically, we focused on investigating a correlation between hashtags and increase of followers to determine whether the addition of hashtags to tweets produces new followers. We have designed a controlled experiment in which we create two groups of users: one tweeting with hashtags and the other tweeting without hashtags. We analyzed their statistical behavior by conducting a nonparametrical Mann Whitney U test. The results showed that there is a correlation between hashtags and followers, therefore tweets that contain hashtags produce a higher increase in the number of followers than tweets without hashtags.