Timing Matters: Inferring Educational Twitter Community Switching from Membership Characteristics

Twitter communities receive increased attention as informal environments for teacher professional development. However, the diversity and temporal evolution in user adoption, switching, and retention are understudied. This study uses the diffusion of innovation (DOI) framework to examine user switching patterns in two large educational Twitter communities (N = 2,039,260 tweets, N = 104,847 unique users). We find that users' DOI types relate to user switching over time. Features of the DOI user classifications and other user-level characteristics explain 79\% of the variance in user switching decisions and 15\% of the timing of user switching. In particular, community switching depends on users' community entry time, Twitter account age, community interaction centrality, and user type (i.e., teacher vs. non-teacher). Therefore, users' perceived community fit and their relative motivation to seek out novel communities to engage with can help explain community-switching behavior. Overall, this study informs community-level interventions for user retention and a better understanding of user diversity in informal educational communities on social media.