Blog 2: Social Media Research
Introduction:
To enhance my study of my key influencer and her social media use, Since the main social media focus of this project is Twitter, I have conducted research on her Twitter account to gage an insight into her purpose for using Twitter and the impact she has on her followers and the general Twitter population.
I will be looking at a range of tweets and deducting what topics her tweets are focused on and how popular these tweets are, as well as looking at her use of affordances. Affordances online are mediators of communication, they introduce a relation between technology and the users as well as interaction from user to user (Butcher & Helmond, 2018). On Twitter these are buttons, such as ‘like’, ‘retweet’, ‘#hashtag’ and ‘@mention’. They convey a particular meaning, feeling or expectation (Kumar, 2015). All data collected and analysed will be discussed in further blog posts relating to the theories mentioned in blog 1.
Method:
For this I have used a quantitative research method, analysing the percentage of tweets about certain topics. The main method of data collection for this project was netnography. Simply put Netnography is the study of digital data sets, locating specific topics and analysing possible online ethical issues that may arise.
The tweets from a span of seven-days from 10/12/2020 to 17/12/2020. This range does not include tweet replies, only personal tweets, retweets and quoted tweets. The purpose of this method is to analyse what Thunberg uses her twitter for; as she is an activist, it would be expected that her twitter is geared towards her topic of interest, in this case the environment.
Data:
Within this data set I have divided the tweets into subsections of personal tweets and retweets, this helped me analyse what information Thunberg was sharing directly from her account to her followers and what information had been shared by others that she has retweeted.
Seen in the graph below, on average Thunberg tweets around 6 times per day and sometimes up to 40, this makes Twitter a viable source of information for this research.
I also created a word cloud of common words used in Thunberg’s tweets and retweets. It is clear from this that the most used words and phrases are centred around the environment of environmental topics for example, #Climateaction, emissions, carbon change. This however is not from just the span of that week studied but the majority of her tweets using a word cloud creator. However, in the study of her tweets the majority of these hashtags and phrases were present in just that week of tweets.
Ethics:
In terms of ethical issues which are the standards of what can been seen as right or wrong depending on the area of study, these are based on rights and fairness (Santa Clara University, 2018). There are some I have had to be weary of when using data from social media. Fortunately, using Twitter for my analysis was a good choice since all the data shared on there is willingly put there however using data and/or names of people who aren’t the key influencer being studied would perhaps be unethical, therefore I chose to leave out tweet replies between Greta and other users, focusing just on her tweets and retweets, which are mostly from companies, charities or other influencers to avoid this issue.
References:
Bucher, T. and Helmond, A. (2018) “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.” P. 3
Kumar A (2015) Hearts on Twitter. Twitter Blogs. Available from: https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hearts-on-twitter
Santa Clara University (2018) What is Ethics? @SantaClaraUniv. [Online] Available at: https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/what-is-ethics/ [Accessed on January 1 2021]
