Topics and feelings of entrepreneurs during a crisis period: Analysis of business Twitter hashtags

Abstract

The study seeks to identify the discussion topics and establish the sentiment of Twitter texts related to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs during a crisis period. The data was collected from 163,843 tweets between May and June 2020. A group of popular hashtags about entrepreneurship and business was identified. The extensive data process was carried out using the term association technique and text sentiment analysis. The results indicate that crisis communications in businesses and by entrepreneurs had two objectives, to communicate the crisis inside the business due to the pandemic and communicate the elements of crisis solution by highlighting the skills, knowledge, means, and critical issues to overcome. The study contributes to the situational crisis communication literature by understanding the characteristics of crisis communication during a crisis period in popular entrepreneurship hashtags.