Social media analytics of the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things technology offers convenience and innovation in areas such as smart homes and smart cities. Internet of Things solutions require careful management of devices and the risk mitigation of potential vulnerabilities within cyber-physical systems. The Internet of Things concept, its implementations, and applications are frequently discussed on social media platforms. This research illuminates the public view of the Internet of Things through a content-based and network analysis of contemporary conversations occurring on the Twitter platform. Tweets can be analyzed with machine learning methods to converge the volume and variety of conversations into predictive and descriptive models. We have reviewed 684,503 tweets collected in a 2-week period. Using supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods, we have identified trends within the realm of IoT and their interconnecting relationships between the most mentioned industries. We have identified characteristics of language sentiment which can help to predict the popularity of IoT conversation topics. We found the healthcare industry as the leading use case industry for IoT implementations. This is not surprising as the current COVID-19 pandemic is driving significant social media discussions. There was an alarming dearth of conversations towards cybersecurity. Recent breaches and ransomware events denote that organizations should spend more time communicating about risks and mitigations. Only 12% of the tweets relating to the Internet of Things contained any mention of topics such as encryption, vulnerabilities, or risk, among other cybersecurity-related terms. We propose an IoT Cybersecurity Communication Scorecard to help organizations benchmark the density and sentiment of their corporate communications regarding security against their specific industry. © The Author(s) 2021.