Influence of Followers on Twitter Sentiments About Rare Disease Medications

Abstract

Due to Twitter’s popularity, companies have started incorporating this social platform into their product marketing. Followers play a pivotal role in the marketing process as they re-tweet recent tweets and spread recent product announcements and achievements of a company among other Twitter users. The main objective of this paper is to understand the influence of followers on the prevailing sentiments about products on Twitter. In this paper, we analyzed the sentiment of tweets of two medications for treating a rare disease. We collected tweets containing the company and medication names. We compared the sentiments of the tweets of the followers with the sentiment of the tweets of the non-followers using Hedonometer scores. We also analyzed differences in sentiments of followers and non-followers among positive and negative tweeted words. Our results indicated that there was no significant difference in the average sentiment of followers and non-followers. For positive words, the tweets of followers were significantly more positive than those of non-followers; however, no such effect was found in tweets containing negative words. We highlight the implications of our results for the product marketing of rare disease medications.