Team members: Michael Clarke, Maoxin Zhou, Siming Zhang, Xiwu Zhang, Yijun Ye
Project mentor: Briana M. Trifiro
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Abstract
Twitter is a social networking platform with over 300 million monthly active users. Among those users are a number of businesses, both large and small. Twitter’s internal research teams are interested in understanding how small businesses utilize Twitter. The present study chose to examine these businesses from the perspective of media event theory. According to media events theory, certain large-scale events will attract excess viewership and attention from the public, both on traditional platforms like network television and on modern social networks such as Twitter. This study examines the ways in which small businesses leveraged media events of 2020, including COVID-19 and the 2020 US presidential election, so as to increase engagement and foster the growth of their businesses via Twitter. Using 35,000 tweets based on media event hashtags collected from 2020, we investigated Twitter engagement among 100 of the fastest-growing small enterprises in the U.S. Our results showed that small businesses were most likely to engage in discussions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred throughout 2020 compared to other media events. Additionally, we examined how engagement varied among tweets that were about media events and those that were about small business activities.
Keywords
media events; media event theory; Twitter; small businesses; engagement; COVID-19
Client Bio
Twitter is a very popular social media platform that has been committed to providing individuals and businesses with more opportunities for communication during the development of the company for more than 20 years. Twitter’s excellent customer services and convenient features should attract many small businesses. Twitter not only provides a convenient communication space for small businesses and their customers but also helps small businesses increase user engagement. To provide a better user experience for small businesses has always been Twitter’s goal. With this goal in mind, our team was tasked with analyzing the ways in which small businesses establish their brands on Twitter and how they are able to optimize their presence on the platform to generate engagement.
Team Bio
Our group is composed of five students pursuing Master’s degrees from the Division of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. All of us are appreciative to have Briana Trifiro as our Ph.D. mentor. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our group members met virtually over the past six months, applying their knowledge to collaborate together across different time zones in an effort to connect academia and industry. Through the EM777 capstone experience, we were able to craft a literature review, perform an in-depth theory application, hone our communication skills, and collaborate with our client to meet their goals.