Temporal Dynamics of Likes and Retweets Engagement of Indian Politicians on Twitter

A multitude of population utilises social media in today’s era. Social Media provides an efficient platform for the exchange of information and rapid propagation of ideas. Politicians, celebrities, content authors, as well as businesses in the health, real estate, beauty, and fashion industries, among others, greatly benefit from this platform. Hence, its study is of paramount significance and the principal actors of social media are - influencers. Our work is built upon the study of influencers of politics in our country - our very own Indian Politicians. Six Indian politicians have been chosen and their Twitter activity has been monitored around the time when Delhi Municipal Corporation elections (December, 2022) were approaching. On investigation, some crucial facts were found regarding the life of a tweet, the importance of mentions and media content in a tweet and much more. These key findings have been explained in this paper which can help influencers achieve better engagement on their tweets. Along with this, some machine learning models have been trained to predict the engagement on a given tweet and achieved the highest accuracy of 80.1%. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt of conducting such thorough study on the temporal dynamics of engagement for Indian Politicians.