Exploring Twitter Follower-Networks of Startup Companies Employing Social Network Analysis and Cluster Analysis

The importance of business strategy for successful social media engagement has quickly increased as more businesses engage in social media. The importance is even greater for startup companies because startup companies are genuinely new to business, and they need to increase their presence in the market, and quickly access future customers. The objective of this paper lies in exploring key indicators of social media engagements by selected startup companies. The key indicators include two aspects of social media usages by the companies: i) overall social media activities, and ii) properties of network structure of the information flow platform provided by social media service. To better assess and evaluate the key indicators of social media usages by startup companies, the indicators will be compared with those of selected large established companies. Twitter is selected as a social media service for the analysis of this paper, and using Twitter REST API, data regarding the key indicators of overall Twitter activities and the Twitter follower-network of each company in the sample are collected. Then, the data are analyzed using social network analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis to examine the characteristics of the follower-network structures and to compare the characteristics between startup companies and established companies. The results show that most indicators are significantly different across startup companies and established companies. One key interesting finding is that the startup companies have proportionally more influencers in their follower-networks than the established companies have. Another interesting finding is that the follower-networks of startup companies in the sample have higher modularity and higher transitivity, suggesting that the startup companies tend to have a proportionally larger number of communities of users in their follower-networks, and the users in the networks are more tightly connected and cohesive internally. The key business implication for the future social media engagement efforts by startup companies in general is that startup companies may need to focus on getting more attention from influencers and promoting more cohesive communities in their follower-networks to appreciate the potential benefits of social media in the early stage of business of startup companies.