Place promotion, place branding and social media communication around entrepreneurial ecosystems: a Twitter analysis

ABSTRACT

We discuss the use of social media communication for place promotion and place branding of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs). As places resting on the advantages of co-location for entrepreneurial activity, EEs offer a novel testbed for the co-creation of a place image in the virtual space of social media. By exploring almost 370,000 tweets from Twitter across 20 European EEs, we observe virtual spaces of EEs being broadly used to share positive messages about the place. However, no EE stands out with a unique image evoking symbolic associations with the place in target audiences. The results suggest the presence of place promotion more than place branding.

KEYWORDS:

• place branding
• place promotion
• entrepreneurial ecosystems
• Twitter
• cities

JEL:

• M39
• O14
• R1
• R10
• R58

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Startup Heatmap Europe by DEEP. The authors also thank the editors of this special issue and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and guidance. All the remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the authors.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This is the later year for which data on business demography are available. Data on firm entry for German cities are based on estimates from the 2018 KfW Start-up Monitor survey.

2. Time trends for individual cities are available in Figure A1 in Appendix A in the supplemental data online.

3. This was performed in R, using the AFINN lexicon (Nielsen, 2011), where each word is assigned a score of negative/positive sentiment between –5 and 5. Analogous results are obtained using the BING lexicon.

4. We also performed LDA with k up to 10 topics. Whilst further separating the main themes reported here, these offer strongly consistent results in terms of underlying topics. These are available from the authors upon request.

5. Results are broadly robust to LDA analysis performed on stemmed words. We report results on full words in light of the potential issues for topic stability due to stemming (Schofield & Mimno, 2016).

6. TF-IDF scores signal the importance of a specific word in the context of a city when it occurs a lot in that city and rarely in the others.