2018 Proceedings of PICMET '18: Technology Management for Interconnected World
Impact of External Stimuli on Social Media
Engagement: A SME Perspective
Olumide Adebayo1, Elif Kongar2, Nasir Jamil Sheikh1
1
Department of Technology Management, School of Engineering, University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, CT USA
2
Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Technology Management, School of Engineering, University of Bridgeport,
Bridgeport, CT USA
Abstract—This paper aims to define and analyze the factors
contributing to the frequency and rate of social media platform
utilization. The focus of the research is on social media big data
and weather as an external force. Juxtaposing weather related
data, Twitter metadata and various data mining algorithms are
used to determine the relationships between an external condition
and the level of user engagement on social media. The research
findings indicate that weather attributes alone and in
combination with others have direct influence on the level of user
engagement. While there are several leading social media
platforms in the USA, the research utilized Twitter considering
data over a one-month period. The highlights of this research
will help organizations that run social media platforms estimate
resource utilization based on provided weather forecasts. The
paper illustrates the drivers of social media engagement while
providing data sourcing and social media platform organizations
with directions for resource allocation and provisioning.
I. INTRODUCTION
Today, one is not considered part of cyberspace unless s/he
is participating in Social Media (SM) [1]. The Internet has
become a staple of our daily living [2] while the engagement in
social media has greatly increased across all age groups [3]
over the past few years. Contrary to the body of knowledge on
cause and effect, the common belief is that people simply use
social media because it is the current buzz. For an organization
providing social media platform services, dealing with
uncertainties with regards to new technology is a major
concern [4]. A major part of this uncertainty can be attributed
to the level of engagement. Almost all small-to-midsize
enterprises (SMEs) have an account with either Facebook or
Twitter or both but the most important thing when it comes to
marketing is the firm’s performance [5]. These category of
businesses are the major driving force for any thriving
economy [6]. The vast majority of them fail to realize the
magnitude of creativivity and innovativion that they can derive
from SM either because they are ill-equipped or simply lack
the informative knowledge necessary.
Many external forces influence us individuals on a daily
basis. Some of these external forces include, but not limited to,
weather, trending news [7], economy, and socio-political
factors. In this study, the focus is on the weather as an external
force and on Twitter, a popular social media platform. Both
weather-related data and the data obtained from twitter are fed
into data mining algorithms to investigate the relationship
between weather conditions and the level of social media
engagement. The research findings indicate that various
978-1-890843-37-3 ©2018 PICMET
weather attributes alone or in combination with others have
direct influence on the level of engagement. While there are a
few other leading social media platforms in the US, the
research was limited to Twitter and to data collected over a
one-month period. The highlights of this research will help an
organization that runs a social media platform with project
resource allocation based on various forecasts of external
factors that affect social media engagement.
A. Big Data
Big data is not a simple discrete technology, but rather a
phenomenon resulting from the vast amount of raw information
generated across society, and collected by commercial and
government organizations [8]. It is a phenomenon defined in
terms of 3V’s. The first V, volume, refers to the magnitude of
data. In big data, data size is in the order of petabytes. This
number however, is relative and what is considered as big data
today may not meet the threshold in the future [9]. Variety is
another dimension in big data which refers to the varying
structure of the data set. Traditional data sets are usually
structured and contain plain text while big data sets are likely
to contain a combination of text, images, audio, video and
several other unstructured types of data. The third V is velocity
representing the rate or speed at which data is created and
ingested. The proliferation of digital devices such as
smartphones and sensors has led to an unprecedented rate of
data creation and has become a major force driving the need
for real-time analytics and evidence-based planning [9]. The
literature offers a few other V’s to describe big data even
though Volume, Velocity and Variety are the three generally
agreed upon dimensions by which big data is defined.
B. Social Media
Social Media “have become essential communication tools
for millions of people − in short, they have become
ubiquitous.“ [10] Social Media is defined as “a group of
Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the
creation and exchange of User Generated Content [1].” It is a
place for people to share ideas, provide feedback, state
opinions and interests [11, 12]. Currently, top social media
sites include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn [13].
C. Engagement
The concept of engagement is still subject to interpretation
and over the years researchers held varying opinions about the
its definition [14]. This is also true in social media related
research. On some social media platforms engagement is
measured in terms of views indicating how many people or
how many times users read a post or watched a video. Other
platforms disregard the number of views and measure the
engagement in terms of clicks, i.e., retweet, like, share, and
save. There are others that measure the engagement in terms of
contributions, i.e., posts messages, blogs and tweets.
This research defines engagement as a combination of the
last two approaches. This is an important distinction since
views do not always reflect active human actions and tend to
introduce more noise than meaningful data.
D. Association Rules
Association rule mining aims to detect all the rules included
in the database using predetermined minimum support and
confidence constraints [15]. This method has been extensively
studied in the literature [16-18], and as a result, several
association rule algorithms such as Apriori [15], Close [19],
Eclat, Clique [16] and CBA [20] have been developed over the
years. This research utilizes the Apriori algorithm due to its
speed and simplicity. The Apriori algorithm employs the
minimum support (minsup) concept [15] and hence provides
relatively faster solutions. A mimimum support is the number
of data cases a rule must cover to be acceptable within a data
set. This value is user-defined and, while picked at random,
relies on years of experience and requires familiarity with the
data set.
II. RELATED WORK
The importance of social media or social networking big
data in business intelligence and decision-making cannot be
over emphasized. Social media big data utilization has proven
itself to be crucial for any business that wishes to survive in
today’s economy. The utilization involves capturing, analyzing
and utilizing collected big data in a timely manner [11].
Today’s businesses need to not only value customers but also
continuously monitor the impact of social media on their
customer base [21].
The literature offers a large number of studies involving
social media engagement [10, 22-25]. Majority of these focus
primarily on measuring, capturing, transforming and
monetizing user engagement and are driven by specific
communication programs such as media relation and crisis
management [23]. Therefore, previous research tends to
investigate how people are engaging rather than why they are
engaging. In one of the rare studies focusing on the latter,
Khan [25] explored the reasons of social media engagement.
Similarly, Kietzmann et al. [12] proposed a framework that
defined social media by using functional social media building
blocks. These studies however, do not aim at addressing the
motivation or the rationale behind the social media
engagement.
Looking at the cause and effect in social media
engagement, Mackie highlighted a group of causes that “are
insufficient but necessary part of a condition which is itself
unnecessary but sufficient for the result [26].” Of their own,
these conditions will likely not to lead to the result but when
combined with other factors, events, situations or
circumstances they snowball into the result under investigation.
Patrick Huppes [27] took it further and emphasized that the
concept of direct remote causes was consistent with relativity.
This alludes to the fact that some event might be a direct cause
of an effect but the ability to have the desired impact is relative
to all other factors lining up as appropriate. This is similar to
the conclusion reached in [28] while looking into the effects of
various external variables on mobile service adoption.
III. METHODOLOGY
There are hundreds of social media sites, platforms or
networks as of today, each with its own unique focus and
attributes. This research focuses on the Twitter engagement for
a number of reasons:
• Ease of use: The twitter search Application Program
Interfaces (APIs) are relatively easier to use.
• Availability of pre-built tools: Twitter embodies several
built-in tools for easier data retrieval.
• Flexibility in structure: Twitter data structure provides
more flexibility for data manipulation.
Similarly, despite the fact that there are several sources of
weather related data, this research utilizes forecast.io, a global
weather service, for its a) reputation as the source of reliable
weather data served on the IOS platform, b) ease of use, and c)
clean and simple interface.
A. Data Collection
This paper utilizes Spring XD as a container for extracting
tweets from Twitter. Spring XD is a Java container that
supports data streaming for big data purposes. The twitter
stream was setup to search tweets that contains the five (5)
vowels –a, e, i, o, u. This allowed for continuous and
uninterrupted extraction of data over a four (4) week period
using an Amazon EC2 free-tier server. A total of seven
hundred thousand (700,000) tweets were extracted as a result.
A custom java application was used to extract weather data
for each of the fifty-two states covering the same period.
Weather data included minimum and maximum temperatures
for the day along with the humidity index. The link between
geo-tagged tweets and weather data is the state-based
geographical coordinates. This data is publicly available on
the Internet. Figure 1 presents the heat map of tweets by US
States out of the 33,000 cleaned tweets. The red indicates
where fewer than a 1,000 tweets were registered and the
intensity of green represent tweets of 1000 to 5000+.
Figure 1 Tweet Heat Map
B. Data Cleaning
One of the major big data related issues this research dealt
with was geo-tagging. Geo-tagging is the process of
identifying geographical information from the data and
assigning spatial coordinates, viz., longitude and latitude, to
each data point [29]. Even with the recent heightened interest
in Location-Based Social Network (LBSN), this is still a great
challenge [30]. With twitter, not all tweets that are geo-
enabled carry geographical information. There is a need to
actually parse each tweet to extract the geographical
information. The fact that tweets are returned as JavaScript
Object Notation (JSON) data objects was useful during this
steps. There were three (3) possible attributes that could
contain geographical information, viz., geo, place and
coordinates [31].
Tweets without values in any of these attributes were
discarded as unusable. Furthermore, only the tweets with
identifiable United States geography were included in the
dataset. Following these steps, the number of tweets are
reduced down to thirty three thousand (33,000) units.
C. Data Integration and Transformation
After identifying tweets originating from various locations
in the United States via the geo-tags in the tweets, there was a
need to match the identified locations to actual states within the
US. This was done via iterative programming and by building a
corpus of location names used by tweeters. As shown in Table
I, the process involved more than a simple find and replace.
TABLE 1 SAMPLE STATE TRANSFORMATION
Original Transformed
Not Self-centered, Texas TX
Lilburn, ga GA
Between some thighs, La LA
New Orleans , La! LA
Apriori association rule is designed for categorical data
prohibiting its use in nominal datasets [15]. In order to
ensure the applicability of the rule, a number of
transformations are conducted in the database. For instance,
in the original dataset, the daily temperature for a given
coordinate was expressed as a range with its lowest and
highest values. The daily temperature is then converted to
its categorical equivalent using the corresponding average
temperature as shown in Table II.
TABLE 2 AVERAGE TEMPERATURE TRANSFORMATION
Average Daily Temperature Category
Less than 65 (<65) Low
Between 65 and 80 (65-80) Medium
Greater than 80 (>80) High
Figure 2 Stacked Clustered Plot of Tweet Count By Weather Condition
The temperature range categorization above is based on
[32] which surveyed what different respondents felt were
temperature ranges. The category transformation for
humidity is as shown in Table III below.
TABLE 3 AVERAGE HUMIDITY TRANSFORMATION
Humidity Index Category
Less than 0.3 (<0.3) Low
Between 0.3 and 0.5 (0.3 – 0.5) Medium
Greater than 0.5 (> 0.5 ) High
Figure 2 provides a visual for the raw user social media
engagement based on various daily weather conditions. The
chart is stacked and each cluster is associated with varying
humidity levels and corresponding average daily
temperatures. Each color band represents the actual count of
tweets after data cleaning. Blue band represents the count of
tweets from regions with low humidity or temperature,
whereas green represents high and red represents medium
bands, respectively.
IV. ANALYSIS AND RESULTS
After applying the Apriori algorithm for association rules
[33], it is observed that both high temperature and high
humidity days resulted in high tweet counts. This result does
not guarantee that high temperature and high humidity days
will provide similar results even though there were no
instances where high temperature or high humidity days were
associated with low tweet counts. The presence of such an
association would have thrown out any theory of cause and
effect that this study was pursuing.
There were no associations between low humidity and high
tweet count or low temperature and high tweet count within the
support level (0.2) that were experimented with. The absence
of these nullifying associations support the hypothesis that
there are external factors affecting the level of engagement in
social media. A 0.2 minimum support level means that the
association rules must be true for at least 20 percent of the data
set. 0.2 minsup has been historically used when dealing with
Social Media data set [34].
 TABLE 4 ASSOCIATION RULE RESULT levels of humidity tweets have large numbers of small tweet
Association Support counts most likely due to higher number of observations.
Average temperature => high tweet count 0.2
High Humidity => high tweet count 0.4 In other to further investigate these results 1-way ANOVA
High Temperature => high tweet count 0.2 test (single factor) is conducted at the α = 0.05 significance
level using the hypotheses:
This study determined that there was most likely a positive H0: μ1= μ2=μ3, all the means are the same
correlation between the prevailing weather conditions and the H1: two or more means are different from the others.
level of engagement in social media. While it cannot be
conclusively stated that high tweet count is the result of high
ANOVA test results are provided in Table 6.
humidity or high average daily temperature, it can be claimed
that the days with high average temperature or the days with TABLE 6 SINGLE FACTOR ANOVA RESULTS
high humidity index result in high tweet counts. It should also
be noted that the analysis does not indicate any association
between low humidity or low average temperature days and
low tweet count.
Since there is no association between low humidity and
high tweet count or low temperature and high tweet count, the
notion of a correlation cannot be rejected. A potential possible
reason for this is that on such days, people tend to stay away
from outdoor activities in favor of indoor activities. This in
turn results in high utilization of social media applications.
Figure 3 presents humidity at varying levels, viz., low,
medium and high, with the corresponding numbers of tweets The p-value (0.000107) is below the significance level of
for each category. Despite minor overlaps it can be observed 0.05 indicating real difference among the means. Therefore the
from the figure that the varying levels of humidity correspond test concludes that the mean tweet counts of all the humidity
to different levels of tweet counts. levels is not the same. Further analysis can be conducted with a
larger data set with equal observations for each level to
investigate the correlation between different external
Humidity vs. Number of Tweets
conditions and the tweet counts.
1
Humidity

0.5 V. DISCUSSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

0 With the ability to digitally collect, store and analyze large
0 500 1000 1500 amounts of data, today’s industry can be best defined with the
Number of Tweets term Industry 4.0 [35] emphasizing the importance of
integrating digital technology to operation and business
Medium Humidity High Humidity Low Humidity models. Recent technological advances coupled with
digitalization of operations had significant impact on pretty
Figure 3 Scatter Plot of Tweet Counts By Varying Humidity Levels
much in every aspect of industrial procedures. These changes
also markedly affected market dynamics and competition over
In order to understand the relationship between tweet
the past few years. Enterprises are now expected to
counts and levels of humidity, average and standard deviation
successfully utilize digital technology to add value to their
of each data set is calculated (Table 5).
operations to remain competitive in today’s complex markets.
TABLE 5 AVERAGE AND STANDARD DEVIATION OF TWEET COUNTS FOR With this motivation, this study demonstrated the utilization of
VARYING LEVELS OF HUMIDITY crowd sourced data to better understand and predict customer
Low Medium High behavior. Analyzed and implemented appropriately, the user
Mean (μ) 13.41 73.03 36.76 involvement in social media might be a powerful factor for
establishing better online practices for any industry, small or
Std. dev. 17.71 122.78 73.27
large that utilize online products and services.
Observations 49 62 739
In terms of the future work, there are a number of
limitations to this study. The first limitation involves the data
As it can be observed from the table, medium levels of size and accuracy. The research utilized data gathered over a
humidity have the highest average, whereas the lower levels of four-week period during significant events occurring in the
humidity has the lowest average number of tweets. This can be United States, e.g. publicized shootings and two political
attributed to the significantly large number of observations in conventions. It would be the focus of future research to
high humidity levels (739) as opposed to low humidity’s 49 observe the changes in the outcome when the data collection is
and medium humidity’s 62. Furthermore, the standard expanded to a longer period where no extraordinary
deviation of medium humidity level is significantly high circumstances are present.
(122.78) pointing to a more dispersed data set whereas high
 Despite the fact that Facebook is the #1 social media site
[13] this research opted to use Twitter, the #3 social media site,
for reasons stated earlier. Utilizing data from the top five (5)
social media sites would validate or refute the findings. While
this remains a target, the vast majority of social media
platforms do not lend themselves easily to third party data
aggregation and analysis. This is mostly likely due to the fact
that most providers build out with speed to market in mind
before considering alternative utilization of data. Research will
be greatly enhanced and benefited if technologist, in the design
of social media platforms, can design for research in addition to
usability. Designing for research in this case would require
platforms to be built with a robust third party data accessibility
feature even with limited access if needed due confidentiality
and other restrictions imposed on collected data. A viable
method would be providing social media data to multiple users
via a masked data lake, where sensitive, private, personal
and/or legal data points are masked out.
Social media data set evaluated for this research included
on the data points that were identifiable as originating from one
of the fifty (50) contiguous states of the United States and
Hawaii. These are limitations that were mindfully placed on
this research for the sake of expediency. The research can be
expanded to investigate global social media utilization.
Including additional external factors, other than the weather,
would increase the depth of this research.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
Social Media networks and marketing grow by leaps and
bounds daily and provide a deep wealth of innovative ideas that
SMEs can tap into for competitive advantage. The challenges
of SMEs are well documented in the literature. It is also well
known that SMEs are risk aversive in nature even in instances
where the organizations have adequate resources to improve
business operations. Dahnil et al. [36] identify ‘users’ as one of
the risk factors for SMEs when it comes to embracing social
media marketing. While a thorough analysis of “social media
user” is not the purpose of this study, this work aimed at
investigating some of the likely external factors influencing a
user in social media networks.
Acknowledging that social media users are not simply in a
vacuum but are influenced by external factors which can be
monitored independently can add significant values to SMEs
that are contemplating initiating a social media platform.
Furthermore, identification of these external factors would
provide valuable information to SMEs that are reluctant in
adopting a social media marketing strategy for growth.
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