  GitHub Sponsors was launched in 2019, enabling donations to open-source
software developers to provide financial support, as per GitHub's slogan:
"Invest in the projects you depend on". However, a 2022 study on GitHub
Sponsors found that only two-fifths of developers who were seeking sponsorship
received a donation. The study found that, other than internal actions (such as
offering perks to sponsors), developers had advertised their GitHub Sponsors
profiles on social media, such as Twitter (also known as X). Therefore, in this
work, we investigate the impact of tweets that contain links to GitHub Sponsors
profiles on sponsorship, as well as their reception on Twitter/X. We further
characterize these tweets to understand their context and find that (1) such
tweets have the impact of increasing the number of sponsors acquired, (2)
compared to other donation platforms such as Open Collective and Patreon,
GitHub Sponsors has significantly fewer interactions but is more visible on
Twitter/X, and (3) developers tend to contribute more to open-source software
during the week of posting such tweets. Our findings are the first step toward
investigating the impact of social media on obtaining funding to sustain
open-source software.
