Diachronic Profile of Startup Companies through Social Media

Abstract Social media platforms have become powerful tools for startups, helping them find customers and raise funding. Analysing the contents posted through social media would help them make the best use of this communication and scale their business. To understand if a startup’s social media content reflects its position in its business maturation, we start by defining an adequate life cycle model for startups based on two dimensions: funding rounds and product maturity. Using Twitter as social media source of information for known Portuguese IT startups, each at their life cycle’s different phases, their tweets’ data has been analyzed. Topic modeling techniques have enabled the categorization of the data according to the topics arising in the published contents, making it possible to discover that contents can be grouped into five specific topics: “Fintech and ML”, “IT”, “Business Operations”, “Product/Service R&D”, and “Bank and Funding”. Comparing those profiles against the startup’s life cycle to understand how contents change over time provides a diachronic profile for each company. We discovered that while some topics are prevalent in the startup’s scaling, others depend on the startup’s particular phase of the cycle, revealing that startups’ Twitter social media content differs along their life cycle.