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Emerging opinion leaders in crowd unfollow crisis: a case study of mobile brands in Twitter

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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the increasing consequences of social networks. For companies, followers in social networks are wealthy because they help to cultivate brand popularity and build well-targeted communities. However, people unfollow sometimes, which indicates a sign of breaking relationships and even losing potential customers. In spite of the fact that unfollow behavior happens frequently, we perceieve that something might be wrong when a unusual large number of unfollows happen simultaneously within a specific window, termed as crowd unfollow. To this end, in this paper we study on the problem of emerging opinion leaders in crowd unfollow and hypothesize that opinion leaders have an impact on the unfollow decision of others. Specifically, given a target brand, we propose a framework to detect crowd unfollow event in real-time and discover opinion leaders within a unfollow social network. Experiments are conducted on the Twitter accounts of three mobile brands. From the empirical results, we have two observations: (1) crowd unfollow could be either durable long-last or short-lived peak shaped; (2) opinion leaders could emerge in crowd unfollow event, which leads to crowd unfollow crisis.

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Notes

  1. https://api.twitter.com.

  2. http://www.marketprobeint.com/index.php/press-twitter.

  3. https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1.

  4. https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/followers/ids.

  5. https://dev.twitter.com/docs/error-codes-responses.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China

    Liyang Tang & Zhiwei Ni

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  1. Liyang Tang
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  2. Zhiwei Ni
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Correspondence to Liyang Tang.

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Tang, L., Ni, Z. Emerging opinion leaders in crowd unfollow crisis: a case study of mobile brands in Twitter. Pattern Anal Applic 19, 731–743 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10044-014-0445-z

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