Examining a Covid-19 Twitter Hashtag Conversation in Indonesia: A Social Network Analysis Approach

Twitter becomes one of the most adopted social media platforms globally, and Indonesia is a country with a rapid growth of Twitter user number in recent years. This paper discusses about the examination of conversation network of Twitter hashtag related to Covid-19 in Indonesia by using a network perspective. During this pandemic situation, Twitter has been increasingly adopted as a medium of conversational interaction amongst people to express their opinion and feeling about the situation, or share information, among others. At the same time, the Indonesian Government has established an official hashtag (#) to coordinate and organize conversations related to a specific topic of Covid-19, namely #BersatuLawanCovid19. In this way, the Government would be able to reach the public interest due to the capability of the hashtag to become a trending topic. This study examines how the Twitter conversations emerged and developed within the Twitter community by using Social Network Analysis approach. We have collected 793 Twitter users and 4441 Twitter chats from the hashtag #BersatuLawanCovid19. We then visualized the relationship network and examined the community using Social Network Analysis metrics with NodeXL. This study found that there is no a mutual engagement amongst the community members in terms of conversational practices. Interestingly, although some members of the community received a high number of engagement efforts from others, they do not actively respond to the initiatives. This suggests that the official account of government who is in-charge of managing the conversation need to enhance their communication strategy to improve the conversation within the community.