Identifying specific interest areas of Twitter users tweeting about cryptocurrencies

Abstract

Social networking sites (SNSs) are web-based online platforms on which users can express their opinions, ideas, lifestyles, share messages and news and communicate with other users. There is limited research conducted on identifying and investigating the interest areas of cryptocurrency users by using SNSs as a data source. In this research, the interest areas of Twitter users who tweeted about cryptocurrencies were investigated by scrutinising their tweets with a topic extraction algorithm. Aligned with the purpose of this study, Twitter users and their tweets were collected with a search query that consisted of cryptocurrency-related words. Then, these tweets were examined and interest areas of users were identified via topic extraction. According to the results of this research, Twitter users who tweeted about cryptocurrencies were also interested in the impact of globalisation, economy, disruptive technologies, politics, digital banking and finance, social life and data science in a descending order of interest.