NETWORK ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Over the past decade, social media has emerged as a major research area in entrepreneurship development, as firms increasingly utilize social media platforms to engage with customers and promote their products and services. However, despite this growth in research, there remains a lack of consensus on the definition and understanding of social media marketing, as well as its impact on entrepreneurship performance. To address this gap in the literature, this paper applies network analysis to a corpus of social media research to identify key topics and themes that have emerged over time, and to explore the relationships between different research areas. The research question that guides this paper is: What are the key research topics and themes that have emerged in social media research in the past decade, and how do these topics relate to each other? To answer this question, we employ network analysis to map the connections between different research areas and to identify the most influential articles and authors in the field. Our analysis reveals several distinct clusters of research, including studies on user behavior, social media metrics, and the role of social media in marketing and branding. We also find evidence of cross-cutting themes that bridge different research areas, such as the impact of social media on customer engagement and the use of social media for crisis communication. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for future research and practice in the area of social media and entrepreneurship development.