Measuring social capital with Twitter within the electronics and ICT cluster of the Basque Country

Abstract

Social network sites like Twitter enable the creation of virtual environments where online communities are formed around specific topics. Lately, due to their increasing success, these platforms are turning out to be effective for electronic word-of-mouth communication since they can be used as another means to spread information and build a network of contacts. In this paper, Twitter is used as a proxy to measure social capital in the electronics and ICT cluster, one of the 22 clusters integrated in the Basque cluster policy. Tweets were extracted through REST and Streaming API and later on studied using Social Network Analysis, both from the static and dynamic perspective. Above all, I highlight a strong correlation at the structural and relational level, intra and inter dimensionally. The social and organizational proximity may explain the tighter relationships among affiliates, where the association that rules the cluster and other firms play an important role.