Abstract
Abstract:
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the process of extricating relationships and interchanges among firms, individuals and connected information objects by way of visual mapping. Through the lenses of graph theory and network theory, this study aims to explore the Twitter social media network shortly after the introduction of the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill to the South African parliament was announced for debate. In graph theory, algorithms are used to extract knowledge and efficient visualisation techniques to represent, for the purpose of this study, pairwise relations between objects, namely Twitter data. An instrumental, single case study design and SNA (based on network theory principles) secured contextual and timely Twitter interchanges of 4 112 tweets of the hashtag “NHI”. The uniqueness of this inquiry is the use of the ‘Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel Pro’ (NodeXL Pro) tool for social media analytics to simplify the Twitter SNA tasks and analysis of the #NHI twitter social media network. The findings explain the data dispersion and network structure of the #NHI case. The significance of the study is that the SNA clearly identifies the influencers, popular Twitter users and gatekeepers in the announcement of a highly controversial healthcare bill that will affect all South African citizens.