Why Did They #Unfollow Me? Early Detection of Follower Loss on Twitter

Abstract

Having more followers has become a norm in recent social media and micro-blogging communities. This battle has been taking shape from the early days of Twitter. Despite this strong competition for followers, many Twitter users are continuously losing their followers. This work addresses the problem of identifying the reasons behind the drop of followers of users in Twitter. As a first step, we extract various features by analyzing the content of the posts made by the Twitter users who lose followers consistently. We then leverage these features to early detect follower loss. We propose various models and yield an overall accuracy of 73% with high precision and recall. Our model outperforms baseline model by 19.67% (w.r.t accuracy), 33.8% (w.r.t precision) and 14.3% (w.r.t recall).