Exploring the structure and characteristics of organizational Twitter communities

Abstract

The main objectives of this research were to identify the characteristics of organizational Twitter communities and to gain insight in the behavior of organizations on Twitter, as to be able to offer insights in how organizations can make use of social media to their strategic advantage. An application was developed to collect and connect twitter-data for 20 organizations enlisted in the Truffle100. For each organization a sample of 100 initiated tweets was classified on their main intention together with a sample of 100 conversations retrieved. Furthermore, hashtag behavior was analyzed for each organization together with the behavior towards the use of multiple organizational twitter accounts. Finally, a list of core/periphery actors were retrieved for each organization and their characteristics were observed as well.