Hyperlinks embedded in Twitter as a proxy for total external inlinks to international university websites

Abstract

Twitter as a potential alternative source of external links for use in webometric analysis is analyzed because of its capacity to embed hyperlinks in different tweets. Given the limitations on searching Twitter’s public application programming interface (API), we used the Topsy search engine as a source for compiling tweets. To this end, we took a global sample of 200 universities and compiled all the tweets with hyperlinks to any of these institutions. Further link data was obtained from alternative sources (MajesticSEO and OpenSiteExplorer) in order to compare the results. Thereafter, various statistical tests were performed to determine the correlation between the indicators and the possibility of predicting external links from the collected tweets. The results indicate a high volume of tweets, although they are skewed by the performance of specific universities and countries. The data provided by Topsy correlated significantly with all link indicators, particularly with OpenSiteExplorer (r = 0.769). Finally, prediction models do not provide optimum results because of high error rates. We conclude that the use of Twitter (via Topsy) as a source of hyperlinks to universities produces promising results due to its high correlation with link indicators, though limited by policies and culture regarding use and presence in social networks.