Exploring the Twitterland of the Impact Investing Market

Abstract

Whilst impact investing has recently exhibited exceptionally high growth rates, creating an interconnected and functioning market remains an open challenge. Social media play an increasingly important role in understanding communication and relations between different players in the market. This is the first time that network, content, and sentiment analysis have been applied to impact investing, to the best of the authors' knowledge. In the paper, we explore the Twitter activities of 83,012 Twitter users in this field over a period of four months. We analyze Twitter sentiment w.r.t. related topics, identify influential Twitter users, and detect retweet communities. We characterize the communities in terms of influential users they comprise, hashtags they use, and how they relate to typical categories of actors in this domain (investors, social businesses,...). Despite policy makers' effort, we find out that more awareness has to be raised about the topic and the market is not so cohesive yet. The role of tech industry is also discussed. We provide recommendations for a more conducive environment to make the market flourish.