Do Twitter phenomena check-in popular venues on Foursquare too?

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to figure out the visiting behaviors of the users who have different characteristics on Twitter.Design/methodology/approachThe visit history of users who share their Foursquare check-ins on Twitter and the characteristics of visited venues (category, check-in count, tip count, like count, rating, and price tier) was collected with Foursquare API. In addition, the number of followers, friends, tweets and favorite-count were collected via Twitter API. First, users were clustered according to their Twitter related attributes. After that, profiling was applied on clusters according to the characteristics of the venues that were visited by the users.FindingsClustering analysis generated three clusters, namely, ordinary, talkative and popular. For each cluster, the visited venues were investigated according to the price classification, check-in, like, tip counts and the categories. The users in ordinary class prefer cheaper venues rather than talkative and popular users. On the other hand, popular users prefer the venues with the highest average number of check-ins, likes and tip counts. The top two categories for all clusters are cafe and shopping mall.Originality/valueThis study differentiates from the other studies in the literature by examining the data from Twitter with clustering and profiling these clusters with Foursquare data to understand venue preferences of Twitter users having various characteristics. The findings of this study will provide new insights for business owners to understand the customers more comprehensively and design better marketing strategies.