The Impact of Twitter Users' Characteristics on Behaviors: Insights Into the Role of Followers

Introduction

Human beings are evolutionarily compelled to live in groups (Van Vugt, 2006; Van Vugt et al., 2008). When people come together, they undergo prompt organization, and leaders and followers emerge. Leadership and followership are fundamental to human practices. Many researchers have explored leaders and leadership, often ignoring followers and followership (Kelley, 1988). Followership is a constant and ubiquitous phenomenon in people’s lives and in business. The act of following is an essential component that is akin to an invisible hand—an unseen force—with the potential to influence the world around us. Understanding this influence or understanding how, what, why people follow would be valuable to influencers on social media and businesses. Thus, the phenomenon of followership is a significant focus of examination in this research.

With rising computer and internet use, literacy, and access has come the proliferation of followership systems such as Twitter. The world is undergoing significant shifts in the traditions of followership and followers (Uppala et al., 2023; Newburger, 2001; Ryan, 2018; Martin, 2021); thus, followership has a new form (Uppala et al., 2023). We use the term eFollowership, an abbreviation for electronic followership, to refer to this distinct phenomenon enabled by modern information and communication technologies.

To study efollowership, we draw from extant followership literature and apply constructs. Uhl-Bien et al. (2014) succinctly summarized the constructionist and role-based lenses as the two theoretical frameworks for the study of followership; in this research, we made use of both. The constructionist lens presents followership as co-constructed between people in social and relational interactions. While according to the role-based lens, followers are agents fulfilling their roles with their behaviors. Twitter followers are both co-creators and role-players with agency. The authors (Uppala et al., 2023) proposed and advanced these conceptualizations.

Thus, in this study, we move away from leader-centric research and build on follower centrism to understand Twitter’s eFollowership. We conceptualize eFollowership and show its application for understanding Twitter followers’ roles. Specifically, the objectives of this research were:

• 1.

  Identify appropriate theories for examining the nascent area of eFollowership.

• 2.

  Apply identified constructs to examine Twitter followership.

• 3.

  Develop a research model depicting relationships between constructs related to Twitter followers. Specifically, to answer the research question: How do Twitter followers’ characteristics influence Twitter followers’ behaviors?

• 4.

  Empirically validate the research model and delineate the important relationships.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, we describe the extant followership literature and the lenses for examining followership and followers. There is a discussion of applying these lenses in the context of Twitter and eFollowership, a new form of followership on social media. Specifically, the discussion provides the foundation for examining the concept of eFollowership with Uhl-Bien et al.’s (2014) lenses and formalized followership constructs derived in previous research (Uppala et al., 2023). Then, applying these identified followership constructs, we propose a research model on Twitter followers’ role-based characteristics and behaviors and test it empirically with survey data and analysis using PLS-SEM. Finally, we present and discuss our results, limitations, suggestions for future research, and conclusions.

Literature Review

Researchers have viewed followership and followers through various lenses, including leader-centric, follower-centric, relational, constructionist, and role-based (Uhl-Bien et al., 2014). These lenses have served as theoretical foundations in much of the followership research.