

Next, explore related keywords and hashtags using the built-in Twitter Search and third party apps such as to identify trends, popularity, and related terms. State your topic first (e.g., Soft drinks and obesity, or the name of a political party, celebrity, or product). In order to collect topic-specific Twitter network data, you must first define your topic. Twitter conversations span a wide range of topic and issues. You can use NodeXL to collect, analyze and visualize this type of social media network data from Twitter.

For example, the relationships of all users who mentioned “HPV” (short for human papilloma virus) during a particular period of time creates a dataset containing a slice of the HPV topic-network. Subgroups of users are selected based on their use of a particular keyword. As a result, discussion “communities” are much more dynamic and emergent. On Twitter, the only indication of a tweet's topic is found within its content, which includes hashtags or keywords relevant to the topic. Instead, individual users can tweet about a wide range of personal, political and social topics. Twitter is not explicitly organized into topic specific discussions, like discussion forums ( Chapter 10). Itai Himelboim, in Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (Second Edition), 2020 11.2 Defining your topic-networks: Formulating a social media monitoring query
