Who leads the conversation? Influential Twitter users during a niche sporting event

Abstract

Fans of niche sports generally find minimal content in mainstream media due to their limited audience. Instead, social media offers them the opportunity to follow these specific sports. The dynamics behind digital media are based on individual participation, hence some prominent users lead the social conversation thanks to their capacity to influence. However, the complexity of the concept of influence and the existence of multiple parameters for its measurement make it difficult to identify these key users. Our research proposes a measure of the influence on Twitter based on variables derived from the platform (number of tweets, number of retweets, and number of followers) and from the Social Network Analysis (outdegree, indegree, and PageRank). The Analytic Hierarchy Process was used to assign a weight to each variable. This measure of influence was applied to the conversation generated on Twitter around a niche sporting event: the 2018 UCI Track Cycling World Championships. From a 19 701-tweet corpus, we identified the 25 most influential users. The results indicate that the organisers and the participating cyclists played a relevant role in the Twitter conversation. In addition, the geographic distribution of these influential users reflects the cultural dependence of niche sports.

La comunicación experiencial como estrategia creativa para promocionar los eventos turísticos españoles

“…Esta percepción será la que cautive al visitante dando un nuevo sentido a la experiencia organizada, haciendo sentir al visitante que por un momento puede formar parte de una comunidad que le ha invitado a participar en esta experiencia (Cristófol et al, 2019). Si el acto presencial está bien organizado, con un diseño intencionado de la experiencia del visitante, dejará huella permanente en los turistas que lo recordarán y hablarán de ello con otras personas de su entorno como uno de los hitos más importante de su viaje (Lamirán-Palomares et al, 2022). La experiencia vivida por el visitante participante de estas experiecias va a influir directamente en su preferencia de marca y su evaluación global del destino, asi como en su intención de compartir contenido sobre ella en redes sociales (Campillo-Alhama y Martínez-Sala, 2019).…”