Exploring Global Entrepreneurship Issues on Twitter

Abstract

Entrepreneurship benefits economic development and innovation, and provides competitive advantages. Thus, entrepreneurship issues have received widespread attention from both academia and governments. However, there is relatively scarce research on the issues or topics that concern most people when talking about entrepreneurship on social media platforms. This study explores global entrepreneurship issues on Twitter. It adopts a text-mining technique followed by a social network analysis to analyze global, real-time longitudinal, and qualitative data from Twitter using 138,089 tweets related to entrepreneurship from 28,592 Twitter users. We observe that the startup phase is the most critical issue when talking about entrepreneurship because most people are interested in acquiring information on how to start a new venture. We also find that busy entrepreneurs prefer obtaining tips to help them work smart. Finally, the four most discussed topics are starting a business, success tips, startup, and team building. The research period is not long enough and all samples in the study are from Twitter Although they are representative, future research can improve the academic and practical implications with extended data collection periods and cross-platforms.