Who Reads Corporate Tweets? Network Analysis of Follower Communities

Social networking sites became very popular since the introduction of Six Degrees in 1997 and companies started to utilize them to build online communities. This research aims to further understand online communities by analyzing the network structure and composition of Twitter follower networks. An explorative analysis is conducted on the Twitter follower network of Europe’s twenty-five largest product software vendors, which includes 95,895 unique followers. A proprietary tool was built for data collection and social network analysis was used to analyze the data. Structural analysis shows that the networks have small-world characteristics and have high reciprocity in terms of following relationships. Analyzing the composition of the networks shows that a) they have a small internal audience and large external audience, b) Twitter is used for monitoring competitors by some, and c) the companies have very distinct and unique follower communities. Especially the uniqueness of the communities demonstrates the value of such communities to companies.