An Analysis of Twitter Usage Among Startups in Europe

Startups are becoming part of the development of policies by the European Commission and corporate strategies. The business press widely covers startups, as does the other media. Local governments in Europe are also developing financial and administrative programs to support startups. Most industries now use social media, and in particular Twitter, to reach their customers. Twitter provides startups the opportunity to reach a global audience at a relatively low cost and still support both promotion and branding. However, there’s a lack of evidence-based research, which examines the Twitter usage among startups within the European Union (EU). This paper outlines preliminary findings about Twitter usage among EU startup founders and contributes to an ongoing study that seeks to define the concept of a startup. Exploring Twitter usage among European startup founders could provide insight into their behavior and expand overall knowledge of how to best define the concept of a startup. The authors retrieved data used in the analysis from one of the most extensive EU databases, F6S.com. The authors collected the Twitter data user handles of EU startups in June and August 2015 and manually verified each Twitter account, which allowed the retrieval of data. The authors then entered the verified data (i.e., verified Twitter accounts) into the Twitter Archiving Google Sheets (TAGS) system that collected data for the purpose this longitudinal study.

The results of this research provide insight into temporal dynamics of Twitter usage, including Twitter account creation, followers, and tweets. There are statistically significant correlations between the Twitter activity of EU startups and the invested amount in that country overall and per capita. This paper offers a methodological contribution in regard to the social media data retrieval techniques, which can provide an insight into Twitter usage among EU startups founders.