| dc.description.abstract | With a user base of over 517 million registered users, Twitter is the second most used popular social networking site, behind Facebook. A growing body of research has examined the online communities, which are built on the Twitter platform. This research is a follow-up study to a previous study, in which the network structure and composition of the corporate Twitter accounts of the twenty-five largest product software vendors in Europe were analysed. The objective of study is to analyse the development of the Twitter follower networks and see if change patterns can be identified in these developments. After the collection of the network data of all companies, that had a Twitter account, social network analysis was utilized to analyse the network structure. Analysis on the network structure has shown that the networks exhibit stronger small-world characteristics than the networks from the previous study. In addition, we also analysed the composition of the networks. The results on the composition has shown that a) the internal audience of the networks has increased, b) only two companies are actively monitoring their competitors, and c) there is an increase in the number of followers that follow multiple companies. Based on these findings, we performed several correlation tests to identify patterns in the development of the networks and found that a) the number of unfollowers is related to the number of tweets posted by the companies, b) the number of new followers is related to the amount of retweets and hashtags used, and c) the increase of the network size has strengthened the small-world characteristics of the networks. | |
