An Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Twitter Sentiment And Influence In The Tourism Domain

Social media have a strong impact on the way users interact and share information. Several previous studies have highlighted how the structure of a social network can affect the dynamics of user interaction and information sharing. The majority of these studies have focused on the role of influencers, i.e. nodes with a central position in the network. Our claim is that while the information shared by influencers has a broader reach, the content of messages plays a critical role and can be a determinant of the social influence of the message irrespective of the centrality of the message's author. In this paper, we put forward four hypotheses supporting this claim by focusing on the sentiment of posts to characterize content and test them on a data set of 500,000 messages from Twitter in the tourism domain. Overall, our hypotheses posit that negative posts are more influential than positive ones. Results show how negative tweets are retweeted more than positive tweets. However, the time dynamics of retweeting seem independent of the sentiment of tweets.