Doing social research on Persian Twitter: An analysis of Iranian users’ activism during Iran’s 2017 presidential election

This paper provides a comprehensive and reliable approach to do social research on Persian Twitter. Twitter has been one of the most favorable social platforms in Iran for years. Despite such popularity, research on Twitter has not been grown as it is supposed to be. Therefore, we are trying to fill this gap by suggesting a complete approach in this article. This approach is based upon social network analysis, ethnographic content analysis and social media critical discourse studies. Combining these methods, we are going beyond limitations of current approaches which focus on either users or tweets. This approach provides researchers with a convenient method from selection of gathering data’s strategy and time to statistical and final analysis. We suggest helpful and reliable concepts and tools to do research on Twitter in each step. Moreover, we present a strategy to coding users’ demographic variables in addition to an approach to reach a close and valid reading of tweets. This approach could consist a convenient basis for future studies.