A PRELIMINARY FORECASTING WITH DIFFUSION MODELS: TWITTER ADOPTION AND HASHTAGS DIFFUSION

Twitter, a global social media, enriches the user’s experience of real-time information communication. Considering Twitter and its hashtag function as innovations, this study applies diffusion of innovation theory to g ain understanding of Twitter adoption and hashtag diffusion. This study utilizes both automatic data collection from the Twitter API platform and secondary data collection to aggregate trend and adoption data. Two diffusion models, the Bass and logistic mo dels, are chosen to perform forecasting growth patterns of Twitter adoption and hashtag diffusion. The preliminary forecasting results are productive though the models can be refined by taking into account more explanatory variables.