Link Sharing on Twitter during Popular Events: Implications for Social Navigation on Websites

The goal of this research is to explore how social media data can be used to help users find information on websites. This paper presents the first stage in this line of research and focuses on the characteristics of links (i.e. website URLs) shared on social media to recommend relevant and popular web pages within the website to others. Specifically, the paper reports on a study of Twitter messages ("tweets") during four different events. Tweets were collected and those containing links were analyzed. The findings from this study encourage us to proceed to the next stage of the research which is to develop and test a social navigation tool on websites incorporating information from social media in order to improve navigation within a website.