Information Diffusion in Halal Food Social Media: A Social Network Approach

Abstract

Few studies have explored the distinct role played by social media in information diffusion. This study investigates the structure, interaction patterns, opinion leaders and communities’ distribution of actors involved in cross-national halal food Twitter networks. A social network analysis (SNA) is employed using a data scraping software to collect around 12,000 halal food tweets. A relatively low density and heterogeneous hub-and-spoke network emerged, with only few influencers/social mediators within small communities controlling the diffusion of information through the network. This result lends strong support to the “Matthew Effect”, which is a variation of the “rich get richer” model. Robustness checks confirmed the existence of small world preferential attachment network linking digital halal food consumers. Our findings hold important implications for different stakeholders as they underscore the relational nature of halal food networks and the importance of the strategic management of social media at the international marketing level as a critical communication tool.

Keywords:

• Halal food
• social media
• social networks
• community detection
• topic modeling