A sentiment analysis of audiences on twitter: Who is the positive or negative audience of popular twitterers?

Abstract

Microblogging is a new informal communication medium of blogging that differs from a traditional blog in which content is much shorter. Microbloggers post about topics that describe their current status. Twitter is a popular microblogging service and social media where users read and write millions of short messages on any topics within the 140-character limit. Twitter is used to find the context of social trend. Popular or influential users tweet about their status and are retweeted, mentioned or replied to by their audience. A sentiment analysis of the tweets of popular users and their audiences discovers whether the audience is favorable or unfavorable to the views expressed by such popular users. We conducted a content analysis of over 1,000,000 tweets mentioning or replying to their thirteen most influential users to discover the sentiment of the audience. Arguably, Twitter messages reflect the silent landscape of sentiment towards its most popular users. This study uses the technique of Sentiment Analysis to deliver a valid popularity indicator or measure. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.