What tweets and retweets on twitter can tell for the restaurant industry: A big-data approach

Abstract

<p>In the Internet age, the sheer volume of information can be generated and disseminated through online user-generated content (UGC). Within the context of Twitter, the retweeting function is one of the key mechanisms, which enables the information diffusion process among users in the social network. Stimulated by this concern, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of textual content including the sentiments, emotions, and language style matching (LSM) of Twitter, a series of statistical analyses are conducted to the Twitter dataset with around one million pieces of customer tweet information. The results indicated that sentiments, emotions, and LSM have significant influences on customer retweeting behavior. Besides, significant differences were identified of both sentiments and emotions based on both six periods of the timeline analysis and the geographic distance at the city level, state level, and nationwide level. Discussions and implications interpreted the significance of the most valuable findings and suggested some important insights to both academia and industry.</p>