Discovering Key Actors and Opinion Leaders on Twitter’s Start-Up and Entrepreneurship Topics Trending: A Social Network Analysis Approach

Abstract

The topic of start-ups and entrepreneurship has been widely discussed on social media to disseminate information while serving as a digital marketing platform. Unfortunately, researchers and practitioners interested in analyzing social networks to gain business advantage through digital platforms still need to be expanded. This paper analyzes networks on social media to find important actors and opinion leaders on trending start-up and entrepreneurship topics. Data analytics is performed using one of the most extensive social media, Twitter. Several visualizations of the social network of these actors are then displayed using specific network visualization applications. The results are discussed by analyzing the main attributes in the network, namely degree, centrality, modularity, and word cloud, which can lead us to discover important attributes in the network: main actors, opinion leaders, groupings of actors according to topics discussed, and specific terms that are trending topics. This paper contributes to digital marketing practitioners and social network analysis studies in related fields with a concise and duplicable methodology. Further research is recommended to work more extensively with more representative data from multiple networks to analyze these topics in more depth.