IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jinfst/v67y2016i5p1105-1120.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Uncovering information from social media hyperlinks: An investigation of twitter

Author

Listed:
  • Liwen Vaughan

Abstract

Analyzing hyperlink patterns has been a major research topic since the early days of the web. Numerous studies reported uncovering rich information and methodological advances. However, very few studies thus far examined hyperlinks in the rapidly developing sphere of social media. This paper reports a study that helps fill this gap. The study analyzed links originating from tweets to the websites of 3 types of organizations (government, education, and business). Data were collected over an 8‐month period to observe the fluctuation and reliability of the individual data set. Hyperlink data from the general web (not social media sites) were also collected and compared with social media data. The study found that the 2 types of hyperlink data correlated significantly and that analyzing the 2 together can help organizations see their relative strength or weakness in the two platforms. The study also found that both types of inlink data correlated with offline measures of organizations' performance. Twitter data from a relatively short period were fairly reliable in estimating performance measures. The timelier nature of social media data as well as the date/time stamps on tweets make this type of data potentially more valuable than that from the general web.

Suggested Citation

  • Liwen Vaughan, 2016. "Uncovering information from social media hyperlinks: An investigation of twitter," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(5), pages 1105-1120, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:67:y:2016:i:5:p:1105-1120
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.23486
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23486
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.23486?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jang Hyun Kim & George A. Barnett & Han Woo Park, 2010. "A hyperlink and issue network analysis of the United States Senate: A rediscovery of the Web as a relational and topical medium," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(8), pages 1598-1611, August.
    2. Bernard J. Jansen & Mimi Zhang & Kate Sobel & Abdur Chowdury, 2009. "Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(11), pages 2169-2188, November.
    3. Liwen Vaughan & Rongbin Yang, 2012. "Web data as academic and business quality estimates: A comparison of three data sources," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(10), pages 1960-1972, October.
    4. Xin Shuai & Alberto Pepe & Johan Bollen, 2012. "How the Scientific Community Reacts to Newly Submitted Preprints: Article Downloads, Twitter Mentions, and Citations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(11), pages 1-8, November.
    5. Mike Thelwall & David Wilkinson & Sukhvinder Uppal, 2010. "Data mining emotion in social network communication: Gender differences in MySpace," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(1), pages 190-199, January.
    6. Liwen Vaughan & Rongbin Yang, 2012. "Web data as academic and business quality estimates: A comparison of three data sources," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(10), pages 1960-1972, October.
    7. Mike Thelwall & Kevan Buckley & Georgios Paltoglou, 2011. "Sentiment in Twitter events," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(2), pages 406-418, February.
    8. Liwen Vaughan & Justin You, 2006. "Comparing business competition positions based on Web co-link data: The global market vs. the Chinese market," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 68(3), pages 611-628, September.
    9. Liwen Vaughan & Guozhu Wu, 2004. "Links to commercial websites as a source of business information," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(3), pages 487-496, August.
    10. Mike Thelwall & Kevan Buckley & Georgios Paltoglou, 2011. "Sentiment in Twitter events," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(2), pages 406-418, February.
    11. Junping Qiu & Jingquan Chen & Zhi Wang, 2004. "An analysis of backlink counts and Web Impact Factorsfor Chinese university websites," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(3), pages 463-473, August.
    12. Mike Thelwall & David Wilkinson & Sukhvinder Uppal, 2010. "Data mining emotion in social network communication: Gender differences in MySpace," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(1), pages 190-199, January.
    13. Xuemei Li & Mike Thelwall & Peter Musgrove & David Wilkinson, 2003. "The relationship between the WIFs or inlinks of Computer Science Departments in UK and their RAE ratings or research productivities in 2001," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 57(2), pages 239-255, June.
    14. Stefanie Haustein & Isabella Peters & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Mike Thelwall & Vincent Larivière, 2014. "Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65(4), pages 656-669, April.
    15. Esteban Romero‐Frías & Liwen Vaughan, 2012. "Exploring the relationships between media and political parties through web hyperlink analysis: The case of Spain," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(5), pages 967-976, May.
    16. Esteban Romero-Frías & Liwen Vaughan, 2012. "Exploring the relationships between media and political parties through web hyperlink analysis: The case of Spain," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(5), pages 967-976, May.
    17. Mike Thelwall & Gareth Harries, 2003. "The connection between the research of a university and counts of links to its web pages: An investigation based upon a classification of the relationships of pages to the research of the host univers," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 54(7), pages 594-602, May.
    18. Liwen Vaughan, 2004. "Exploring website features for business information," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 61(3), pages 467-477, November.
    19. Jang Hyun Kim & George A. Barnett & Han Woo Park, 2010. "A hyperlink and issue network analysis of the United States Senate: A rediscovery of the Web as a relational and topical medium," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(8), pages 1598-1611, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hanya Riad & Claudio Vitari, 2019. "The Effect of Interpretive Media Packages on Political Engagement: a new framework [Les effets des réseaux sociaux sur l'engagement politique : un nouveau model]," Post-Print hal-02293770, HAL.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. David Gunnarsson Lorentzen, 2014. "Webometrics benefitting from web mining? An investigation of methods and applications of two research fields," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 99(2), pages 409-445, May.
    2. Enrique Orduna-Malea & Selenay Aytac, 2015. "Revealing the online network between university and industry: the case of Turkey," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 105(3), pages 1849-1866, December.
    3. Bar-Ilan, Judit, 2008. "Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 1-52.
    4. Beatriz Barros & Ana Fernández-Zubieta & Raul Fidalgo-Merino & Francisco Triguero, 2018. "Scientific knowledge percolation process and social impact: A case study on the biotechnology and microbiology perceptions on Twitter," Science and Public Policy, Oxford University Press, vol. 45(6), pages 804-814.
    5. Pardeep Sud & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "Linked title mentions: a new automated link search candidate," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(3), pages 1831-1849, December.
    6. Li, Xianghua & Wang, Zhen & Gao, Chao & Shi, Lei, 2017. "Reasoning human emotional responses from large-scale social and public media," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 310(C), pages 182-193.
    7. Krzysztof BORODAKO & Jadwiga BERBEKA & Michał RUDNICKI & Mariusz ŠAPCZYŃSKI, 2021. "Online Visibility and Knowledge-Intensive Business Services Performance: The Scope of Interrelatedness," Journal of Emerging Trends in Marketing and Management, The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, vol. 1(1), pages 157-173, August.
    8. Daniel E. O'Leary, 2015. "Twitter Mining for Discovery, Prediction and Causality: Applications and Methodologies," Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 22(3), pages 227-247, July.
    9. Stine Labes & Nicolai Hanner & Ruediger Zarnekow, 2017. "Successful Business Model Types of Cloud Providers," Business & Information Systems Engineering: The International Journal of WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK, Springer;Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), vol. 59(4), pages 223-233, August.
    10. Young Mee Chung & So Young Yu & Yong Kwang Kim & Su Yeon Kim, 2009. "Characteristics and link structure of a national scholarly Web space: The case of South Korea," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 80(3), pages 595-612, September.
    11. Judit Bar-Ilan & Rina Azoulay, 2012. "Map of nonprofit organization websites in Israel," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(6), pages 1142-1167, June.
    12. Erjia Yan & Qinghua Zhu, 2008. "Hyperlink analysis for government websites of Chinese provincial capitals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 76(2), pages 315-326, August.
    13. Sashittal, Hemant C. & Hodis, Monica & Sriramachandramurthy, Rajendran, 2015. "Entifying your brand among Twitter-using millennials," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 58(3), pages 325-333.
    14. Liwen Vaughan & Esteban Romero-Frías, 2012. "Exploring Web keyword analysis as an alternative to link analysis: a multi-industry case," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 93(1), pages 217-232, October.
    15. Stefan Stieglitz & Christian Meske & Björn Ross & Milad Mirbabaie, 2020. "Going Back in Time to Predict the Future - The Complex Role of the Data Collection Period in Social Media Analytics," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 22(2), pages 395-409, April.
    16. Chen, Aihui & Lu, Yaobin & Wang, Bin & Zhao, Ling & Li, Ming, 2013. "What drives content creation behavior on SNSs? A commitment perspective," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 66(12), pages 2529-2535.
    17. Hua Bai & Guang Yu, 2016. "A Weibo-based approach to disaster informatics: incidents monitor in post-disaster situation via Weibo text negative sentiment analysis," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 83(2), pages 1177-1196, September.
    18. Mahsa Amiri & Maryam Yaghtin & Hajar Sotudeh, 2024. "How do tweeters feel about scientific misinformation: an infoveillance sentiment analysis of tweets on retraction notices and retracted papers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(1), pages 261-287, January.
    19. Setten, Eric & Chen, Steven, 2024. "Playing with emotions: Text analysis of emotional tones in gender-casted Children’s media," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 175(C).
    20. Kim Holmberg & Julia Vainio, 2018. "Why do some research articles receive more online attention and higher altmetrics? Reasons for online success according to the authors," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(1), pages 435-447, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:67:y:2016:i:5:p:1105-1120. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.