A social network analysis: identifying influencers in the COVID-19 vaccination discussion on twitter

Abstract

Social media analytics, especially Twitter, has experienced significant growth over the last few years. The data generated by Twitter provides valuable information to many stakeholders regarding user behavior, preferences, tastes, and characteristics. The presence of influencers on social media can invite interaction with other users. An influencer can affect the speed of spreading information on social media. This study looks at the influence of influencers and information dissemination channels on Twitter data related to COVID-19 vaccination in Indonesia as one of the hot Twitter discussion trends. This study applies Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a theoretical and methodological framework to show that interactions between users have differences on the network when the analyzed tweets are divided into mention and retweet networks. This study found that the key accounts in disseminating information related to Covid-19 vaccination were dominated by official accounts of government organizations and online news portals. The official Twitter account of government organizations turns out to have an essential role in disseminating information related to COVID-19 vaccination, namely the @KemenkesRI account belonging to the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Indonesia and the @Puspen_TNI account belonging to the TNI Information Center.

Keywords

Social network analysis; Social media analytics; Data mining; Social media; Twitter

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http://dx.doi.org/10.28989/compiler.v10i2.1074

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