Uncovering information from social media hyperlinks: An investigation of twitter

Abstract

Analyzing hyperlink patterns has been a major research topic since the early days of the web. Numerous studies reported uncovering rich information and methodological advances. However, very few studies thus far examined hyperlinks in the rapidly developing sphere of social media. This paper reports a study that helps fill this gap. The study analyzed links originating from tweets to the websites of 3 types of organizations (government, education, and business). Data were collected over an 8‐month period to observe the fluctuation and reliability of the individual data set. Hyperlink data from the general web (not social media sites) were also collected and compared with social media data. The study found that the 2 types of hyperlink data correlated significantly and that analyzing the 2 together can help organizations see their relative strength or weakness in the two platforms. The study also found that both types of inlink data correlated with offline measures of organizations' performance. Twitter data from a relatively short period were fairly reliable in estimating performance measures. The timelier nature of social media data as well as the date/time stamps on tweets make this type of data potentially more valuable than that from the general web.

Web citations in patents: Evidence of technological impact?

“…An alternative to using web link variants is to use social media metrics such as commenting, downloading, and recommending, known as altmetrics (Priem & Hemminger, ; Thelwall, 2012). Some of these metrics include hyperlinks, for example within Tweets (Orduna‐Malea, Torres‐Salinas, & Delgado López‐Cózar, ; Vaughan, ), but most focus on impact indicators for individual articles or journals (Haustein & Siebenlist, ) rather than for entire organizations. The number of links from Twitter (Orduna‐Malea et al, ) and Wikipedia (Orduna‐Malea & Ontalba‐Ruipérez, ) correlate with the inlinks received by sets of national and international universities, giving evidence of their value.…”

Measuring visibility of disciplines on Chinese academic web

“…Social media may be another alternative to explore the relationships between universities [92] or to group online users [96,97]. Although the relationships between schools or universities on social media are not involved in this study, Vaughan [98] found that inlink data from social media are highly correlated with that from the general web. Even if compared with the relationships from the offline media, such as newspaper and policy partnership, hyperlink network exhibits similar actor-level characteristics to the other two [99].…”

Identification of phishing websites through hyperlink analysis and rule extraction

“…Unlike previous studies on hyperlink analysis, which typically investigated a single data source and did not comprehensively cover the websites (Yan and Zhu, 2008), hyperlink indicators collected from these platforms can comprehensively describe the websites. Apart from the above hyperlink indicators related to a website, social media is also an important and useful source of data for a complete evaluation of websites (He et al, 2013;Vaughan, 2016). Therefore, the numbers of hyperlinks in three major social media platforms, which include Facebook, Twitter and Googleþ, were also collected.…”