Exploring potential communities of followers in governmental Twitter accounts of EU countries

The Twitter accounts of 56 ministries of 17 EU countries are recorded along with their followers. The mentions/replies (m/r) network of the followers for each account is constructed in order to study whether it demonstrates community characteristics. Clustering coefficient, assortativity and degree skewnness are used as network indexes to explore whether m/r networks constitute small-worlds and scale-free networks. These indexes are then associated with Twitter performance and activity indexes to explore how m/r networks differentiate across accounts of different popularity and performance. Findings are provided for both the individual accounts and for the aggregate data of the countries which the accounts belong to. The m/r networks could be scale-free networks but not small-worlds. Skewnness is high but assortativity and clustering coefficient are, on average, equal to zero. M/r networks cannot be considered to form communities of followers. Accounts and countries with accounts of high Twitter performance offer even less evidence that followers constitute communities.

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