Is tweet sentiment related to church growth?

What is it about?

This paper investigates whether there is a relationship between the sentiment of tweets about church (how positive or negative the tweets were) and the presence of church growth in the geographical area from which the tweet was posted. The study found that there is a relationship between the sentiment of church-related tweets and church growth.

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Why is it important?

Twitter data (and social media data more generally) is a huge source of quickly accessible social data - samples of which can often be accessed by researchers at no cost. This study explores the use of such data to better understand church growth. In future, knowledge of the relationship between the sentiment of church-related tweets and church growth might enable researchers to develop proxy measures of the presence (or not) of church growth in the absence of reliable survey data. Furthermore, this proven relationship between online sentiment and offline engagement might enable researchers in other fields to better understand the offline activities of identified groups based on their online social media activity.