  Information exchange and message diffusion have moved from traditional media
to social media platforms. Messages on platforms such as Twitter have become
the default mode of company communications replacing lengthier public
announcements and updates. Businesses and organizations have increased their
use of Twitter to connect with stakeholders. As a result, it is important to
understand the key drivers of successful information exchange and message
diffusion via Twitter. We conducted an exploratory analysis on a dataset of
over a million Tweets, comprising of over 40,000 lead Tweets, further filtered
to over 18,000 Tweets. We identified the most popular messages, and analyzed
the tweets on multiple endogenous dimensions including content, sentiment,
motive and richness, and exogenous dimensions such as fundamental events,
social learning, and activism. We found some interesting patterns and uncovered
new insights to help researchers and practitioners better understand the
behavior of popular viral tweets. We also performed sentiment analysis and
present an early stage model to explain tweet performance.
