## 3 Data Collection and Description  
This is exploratory research, aiming to locate Twitter accounts that share followers, and in this way, to conclude on how the citizens choose what accounts to follow. Furthermore, the paper proposes two quantitative techniques: association rules are used as a complementary descriptive technique, which can help us describe the large picture, and multidimensional scaling followed by hierarchical cluster analysis are used to locate combinations of accounts sharing followers. The questions that this study aims to answer are:1. How many citizens follow each account? 2. How many of them follow more than one account? 3. How many accounts share followers? 4. What are the combinations of accounts that are followed by the same followers? 5. Do followers choose which accounts to follow by means of the accounts' thematic similarity? During 10-11 May 2013, the followers of 27 Greek e-government Twitter accounts that have a national appeal and interest were recorded. Recording of the accounts was based on the official registers and agency records of the Greek government. The accounts referred to the general government, the ministries with its services and their secretariats, along with the operational programs. Two independent authorities and one official forum that deal with e-government matters were included. To find the accounts, as the first step, the official web sites of the organizations were used, in order to search for links to Twitter. Next, we used Google search with specific key words. As the last step, we used Twitter's own search engine. The recorded accounts are described in Table 1. Table 1 also describes the intended purpose and the target audience of each account (G2C: Gov-to-Citizen, G2B: Gov-to-Business, G2G: Gov-to-Gov), in order to enrich the finding of the analysis. The intended purpose of the accounts drew upon a list of main e-participation areas. Table 1 also reports the number of followers of each account along with the percentage of them that also follow other accounts. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l l} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Name**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**Description**} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Intended purpose**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**Followers**} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Percentage of**} \\  & & **(target audience)** & & **followers that** \\ \hline \multirow{3}{*}{HCoastGuard} & Official account of the & Information Provision & \multirow{3}{*}{1,522} & \multirow{3}{*}{88\%} \\  & Greek coastguard. & (G2C) & & \\ \hline \multirow{6}{*}{Diavgeia} & Account of the Greek & \multirow{3}{*}{1,522} & \multirow{3}{*}{88\%} \\  & Ministry of Administrative & & & \\ \cline{1-1}  & Reform and e-government, & & & \\ \cline{1-1}  & which aims to achieve & \multirow{3}{*}{Information Provision, Consultation (G2C)} & \multirow{3}{*}{2,256} & \multirow{3}{*}{91\%} \\ \cline{1-1}  & maximum publicity of & & & \\ \cline{1-1}  & government policy & & & \\ \cline{1-1}  & (Ministry of Interior). & & & \\ \hline \multirow{3}{*}{Digitalgreece} & \multirow{3}{*}{Digital Greece 2020 Forum.} & Community & \multirow{3}{*}{469} & \multirow{3}{*}{77\%} \\  & & Building/Collaborative & & \\ \cline{1-1}  & Digital Greece 2020 Forum. & Environments, & & \\ \cline{1-1}  & & Information Provision, Consultation (G2C, G2B) & & \\ \hline \multirow{3}{*}{DigiPlanGR} & Secretariat for & Information Provision & \multirow{3}{*}{738} & \multirow{3}{*}{91\%} \\  & Digital Planning. & (G2C, G2B) & & \\ \hline \multirow{3}{*}{e\_ekpaideusi} & Operational Programme for & \multirow{3}{*}{77} & \multirow{3}{*}{78\%} \\ \cline{1-1}  & Education and Lifelong & & & \\ \cline{1-1}  & Learning from the Greek & \multirow{3}{*}{(G2C, G2B)} & \multirow{3}{*}{77} & \multirow{3}{*}{78\%} \\ \cline{1-1}  & Ministry of Education. & & & \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: The 27 e-government Twitter accounts included in the analysis. _Future Internet_**2014**, \(6\)