Online Social Activity Reflects Economic Status

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that online social activity data from Sina Microblog can accurately reflect local economic development and industrial structure, providing a cost-effective and real-time alternative to traditional economic indicators.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach linking social media activity to economic status, enabling instant and low-cost economic analysis and risk detection.

Findings

Strong correlation between social activity and economic development

Real-time insights into macro-economic structure

Potential for early detection of economic risks

Abstract

To characterize economic development and diagnose the economic health condition, several popular indices such as gross domestic product (GDP), industrial structure and income growth are widely applied. However, computing these indices based on traditional economic census is usually costly and resources consuming, and more importantly, following a long time delay. In this paper, we analyzed nearly 200 million users' activities for four consecutive years in the largest social network (Sina Microblog) in China, aiming at exploring latent relationships between the online social activities and local economic status. Results indicate that online social activity has a strong correlation with local economic development and industrial structure, and more interestingly, allows revealing the macro-economic structure instantaneously with nearly no cost. Beyond, this work also provides a new venue to identify risky signal in local economic structure.