Unlocking the power of Twitter communities for startups

Abstract Social media platforms offer cost-effective digital marketing opportunities to monitor the market, create user communities, and spread positive opinions. They allow companies with fewer budgets, like startups, to achieve their goals and grow.In fact, studies found that startups with active engagement on those platforms have a higher chance of succeeding and receiving funding from venture capitalists.Our study is focused on exploring how startups utilize social media platforms to foster social communities. We also aim to characterize the individuals within these communities. The findings from this study underscore the importance of social media for startups.We used network analysis and visualization techniques to investigate the communities of Portuguese IT startups through their Twitter data. For that, a social digraph has been created, and its visualization shows that each startup created a community with a degree of overlap. The overlap of users between communities was characterized using user node-level measures. The results indicate that users in the Portuguese IT startup communities overlap and are of the following types: person, company, blog, venture capital/investor, IT Event, incubator/accelerator, startups, and university. Furthermore, startups follow users who post high volumes of tweets and have high popularity levels, while those who follow them have low activity and are unpopular. The attained results reveal the power of Twitter communities and offer essential insights for startups to consider when building their social media strategies. Lastly, this study proposes a methodological process for social media community analysis on platforms like Twitter.