Visualising the Social Media Conversations of a National Information Technology Professional Association

Abstract

Social media systems are important for professional associations (PAs), providing new ways for them to interact with their members and stakeholders. Evaluation of the impact of social media is not straightforward. Here text analytics, specifically multidimensional scaling visualisation, is proposed as an approach for the characterisation of the large scale ‘conversations' occurring between an information and communication technology PA and its stakeholders via the Twitter social media system. In the case presented, there was found to be a significant level of congruence between the corresponding visualisations of tweets from the PA, and tweets to/about the PA, although differences were also observed. The new method proposed and piloted here offers a way for organisations to conceptualise, identify, capture and visualise the large-scale, ephemeral, text conversations about themselves on Twitter, and to assist them with key strategic uses of social media.