Abstract
In this paper we try for the first time to shed light on the use of Twitter by the Italian speaking users quantifying the total audience and some relevant characteristics: in particular, gender and location. The attempt is based on publicly available APIs data referring both to profile documents and tweets. Through real-time calculation is possible to infer the gender mainly using the name field of the users’ profile, while the geo-location is deduced using the location field and the geotagged tweets.
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Notes
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According to Alexa.
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For further information see [22] and the references therein.
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The enterprises whose websites were scraped in the cited study, were the majority (64%) of the enterprises (with 10 employees and over) having a website, but only the half of these enterprises presented links to social media.
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For example, consider a company named “rossi” and the username “alexRossi”. The username contains the company name but the remaining letters can be interpreted as a male proper name and hence the username is not labelled as a company.
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i.e. the Italian National Institute of Statistics list of municipalities, containing 7978 Italian municipalities.
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We tried also to determine the users profession using the bio field, through a list of roughly 1000 professions. Results were absolutely not satisfactory maybe because the bio field is an open field that each user interprets in her own way.
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Alessandra, R., Gentile, M.M., Bianco, D.M. (2019). Who Tweets in Italian? Demographic Characteristics of Twitter Users. In: Petrucci, A., Racioppi, F., Verde, R. (eds) New Statistical Developments in Data Science. SIS 2017. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol 288. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21158-5_25
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