Users’ self-description on social media: a methodology to integrate labels and textual information

Riccardo Ricciardi ()
Additional contact information
Riccardo Ricciardi: University of Brescia

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2025, vol. 59, issue 2, No 3, 1033-1057

Abstract: Abstract To analyze how groups of people self-describe on social media, existing studies separately or partly exploited labels and textual self-descriptions. In this paper, we leveraged both sources of information about the users in an integrated procedure, by training a language model on a sample of text documents with balanced characteristics, and then, by using a list of both domain-specific and statistically relevant words as a guide, similarities between word and document representations were explored to analyze group differences in self-describing. Eventually, a bootstrap procedure was employed to assess the reliability of the results. The methodology proposed was applied on data from StockTwits platform, where people write a bio and declare their experience, approach, and primary holding period in trading. We found that groups of traders differ in semantics. In addition, the relationship between the approach in trading and the holding period still holds in self-descriptions, whereas the experience transversely influences bio writing, with professionals using words strictly specific to the domain of stock trading.

Keywords: Social media; Seed words; Document vectors; Bootstrap; StockTwits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11135-024-01988-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:qualqt:v:59:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s11135-024-01988-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11135-024-01988-6

Access Statistics for this article

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology is currently edited by Vittorio Capecchi

More articles in Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().