Social Media Analytics of the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things technology offers convenience and innovation in areas such as smart homes and smart cities. Internet of Things solutions require careful management of devices and the risk mitigation of potential vulnerabilities within cyber-physical systems. The Internet of Things concept, its implementations and applications are frequently discussed on social media platforms. This research provides thematic analysis of contemporary conversations regarding Internet of Things occurring on the Twitter platform. Tweets can be analyzed to evaluate the volume and variety of conversations related to a specific topic. We have reviewed 684,503 tweets collected in a two-week period. We have identified the most mentioned industries with interest in Internet of Things. The healthcare industry is the most mentioned within the collection of tweets. This is not surprising as the current Covid-19 pandemic is driving significant social media discussions. Using unsupervised clustering of tweets by term frequency, the top trend was found to be data science. Additional findings are discussed further.