Sentiment Analysis As a Valid Popularity Measure  

Bae, Y., & Lee, H. (2012). Sentiment analysis of twitter audiences: Measuring the positive or negative influence of popular twitterers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and technology, 63(12), 2521-2535.

The authors of this article reports that Twitter, a 140-character limit platform is used by popular and influential people to engage with their followers. It is reported that sentiment analysis of these individuals can reveal whether followers are in support with what their influencers are tweeting. An analysis of more than 3,000,000 tweets both mentioning and replying to influential people was used to determine the audience sentiment. The researchers used sentiment analysis technique as a valid popularity measure. In this process the first step was to distinguish between positive and negative audiences of the popular social media users. It was discovered that the sentiments in the popular users’ posts was reflected in the sentiments of their followers. The study also used the Granger casualty analysis which revealed that there is an association between social media and real-world sentiment among the popular users.  

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