Characterizing Twitter Users: What do Samantha Cristoforetti, Barack Obama and Britney Spears Have in Common?

The exponential growth in the use of digital devices and the ubiquitous online access produce a huge amount of structured and unstructured data that can be mined and analyzed to gather insights into several domains. In particular, since the advent of Web 2.0, Online Social Networks (OSNs) represent a rich opportunity for researchers to collect real user data and to explore OSNs users behavior. This study represents a first attempt to characterize and classify OSNs users according to their level of activity through the use of user profile attributes. We analyzed four case studies from the Twitter platform for a final total of around 721 thousand users, divided into four sub-datasets and examined over a period of at least six months in 2017. Following a data-driven methodology, we found that static, profile-based information - based on the entire lifetime of the users - can help to recognize users influence in Twitter online communities. On the other hand, these profile attributes are not enough to characterize user activity on the microblogging platform.