An Analysis of Twitter Users From The Perspective of Their Behavior, Language, Region and Development Indices -- A Study of 80 Million Tweets

Abstract

The need for a comprehensive study to explore various aspects of online social media has been instigated by many researchers. This paper gives an insight into the social platform, Twitter. In this present work, we have illustrated stepwise procedure for crawling the data and discuss the key issues related to extracting associated features that can be useful in Twitter-related research while crawling these data from Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Further, the data that comprises of over 86 million tweets have been analysed from various perspective including the most used languages, most frequent words, most frequent users, countries with most and least tweets and re-tweets, etc. The analysis reveals that the users' data associated with Twitter has a high affinity for researches in the various domain that includes politics, social science, economics, and linguistics, etc. In addition, the relation between Twitter users of a country and its human development index has been identified. It is observed that countries with very high human development indices have a relatively higher number of tweets compared to low human development indices countries. It is envisaged that the present study shall open many doors of researches in information processing and data science.