Hasan et al., "The Impact of Viral Posts on Visibility and Behavior of Professionals: A Longitudinal Study of Scientists on Twitter" (2022)

Rakibul Hasan, Cristobal Cheyre, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Roberto Hoyle, and Apu Kapadia, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 16, 323–334 (2022)
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@inproceedings{hasan2022impact,
    title = {The Impact of Viral Posts on Visibility and Behavior of Professionals: A Longitudinal Study of Scientists on Twitter},
    author = {Rakibul Hasan and Cristobal Cheyre and Yong-Yeol Ahn and Roberto Hoyle and Apu Kapadia},
    booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)}},
    volume = {16},
    pages = {323--334},
    doi = {10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19295},
    year = {2022},
}

Uses longitudinal activity and follower data from 17,157 scientists on Twitter with a matching-based design to study first-time micro-viral posts. After these events, scientists tweeted more frequently and gained more followers than a control group; their posts also became more objective, positive, professionally aligned, and topically concentrated.

Social media in academia, Virality, Twitter