Organizations Are Users Too: Characterizing and Detecting the Presence of Organizations on Twitter

Abstract

Much work on the demographics of social media platforms such as Twitter has focused on the properties of individuals, such as gender or age. However, because credible detectors for organization accounts do not exist, these and future large-scale studies of human behavior on social media can be contaminated by the presence of accounts belonging to organizations. We analyze organizations on Twitter to assess their distinct behavioral characteristics and determine what types of organizations are active. We first create a dataset of manually classified accounts from a representative sample of Twitter and then introduce a classifier to distinguish between organizational and personal accounts. In addition, we find that although organizations make up less than 10% of the accounts, they are significantly more connected, with an order of magnitude more friends and followers.