Is it all about politics? A hashtag analysis of the activities of the Swedish political Twitter elite

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to map the topics discussed over three four week periods among a set of predefined Twitter users.

Method: 985 Twitter users were selected from an eight week pilot study of conversations around a political hashtag. These were tracked for a total of twelve weeks during one year. The hashtags in tweets posted by and to these users were analysed with regards to co-occurrences and trends.

Findings: Overall, political topics dominated the activities of and around the Twitter elite. Differences between usage of hashtags could be seen when considering only tweets posted by the tracked users compared to when considering all tweets in the dataset. The 258 most often used hashtags were closely related to most other prominent hashtags.

Originality: This longitudinal study sheds light over how topics and hashtags evolve over time.