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In 5 essays covering the political and financial domains, this dissertation investigates whether information extracted from the microblogging forum Twitter can serve as an indicator of real-world events and explores the mechanism that explains the efficient aggregation of information. It illustrates, for example, that pre-election microblogs can reflect the political preferences of the general population and that the sentiment (i.e., bullishness) of stock-related tweets is correlated with abnormal stock returns. In addition, it provides empirical evidence supporting the idea that followership relationships and retweets represent the Twittersphere's "currency" for weighing information, since users providing above average investment advice are retweeted (i.e., quoted) more often and have more followers. Thus, this dissertation contributes to the understanding and use of social media content in social science research. ; Die Dissertation untersucht in 5 Essays im politischen und finanzwissenschaftlichen Kontext, ob aus dem Microblogging Forum Twitter gewonne Informationen als Indikator von Ereignissen in der realen Welt genutzt werden können und liefert eine Erklärung für die effiziente Aggregation von Informationen in diesem sozialen Medium. Sie veranschaulicht z.B., dass politische Microblogs die Stimmung der Wählerschaft reflektieren und zeigt, dass die Stimmung von aktienspezifischen Microblogs mit Entwicklungen auf den Finanzmärkten korrelieren. Außerdem stützt die Arbeit die Hypothese, dass die Online-Beziehungen von Microbloggern und Zitierungen untereinander dazu genutzt werden Informationen zu gewichten und leistet damit einen Beitrag zur Nutzung von Inhalten sozialer Medien in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung.

In their comment, Jungherr, Jürgens, and Schoen (2010) challenged part of the results presented in our original article ( Tumasjan, Sprenger, Sandner, & Welpe, 2010 ). The present response addresses their points of concern and demonstrates that the conclusions drawn in Tumasjan et al. (2010) are well supported by both data and analyses.

This study investigates whether microblogging messages on Twitter validly mirror the political landscape off-line and can be used to predict election results. In the context of the 2009 German federal election, we conducted a sentiment analysis of over 100,000 messages containing a reference to either a political party or a politician. Our results show that Twitter is used extensively for political deliberation and that the mere number of party mentions accurately reflects the election result. The tweets' sentiment (e.g., positive and negative emotions associated with a politician) corresponds closely to voters' political preferences. In addition, party sentiment profiles reflect the similarity of political positions between parties. We derive suggestions for further research and discuss the use of microblogging services to aggregate dispersed information.