Twitter Talk - What People Tweet About

Many brands are still grappling with the value and rationale in respect to the micro-blogging platform - Twitter. Many ask what is the purpose of Twitter and how can I leverage it for my brand, press efforts, or customer service. The great thing is that you can use it for all of those things. Additionally, one of the most powerful things about Twitter is a little part called “Search”. It is truly underutilized in my opinion by many. A wealth of information can be gleaned from that little box of the Twitter homepage about your customers, prospects, and competitors. Our own search product allows for the same type of search functionality across multiple social media data types allowing you to filter and understand if their are unique things happening in one media type verses another.

Back to Twitter, at its core the Twitter platform is great for conversations and promotion but many critics argue that Twitter is just a bunch of noise. Although, I don’t agree with this statement I will concede that at times it challenging to sift through the volumes of tweets and I don’t run marketing for major brand like Coke or Best Buy. A recent study from Pear Analytics of the site’s public timeline revealed the following:

Tweets were placed into one of six categories, and fortunately for the skeptics “pointless babble”— was 3% higher than conversational tweets. Conversational tweets—those part of a dialogue between users or starting with the “@” symbol—made up another 37.55% of tweets. Tweets with pass-along value, also known as “retweets,” were much less prevalent, at 8.7%, and self-promotional messages made up just 5.85% of the total. Spam and news were even rarer. Re-tweets with pass-along value, important for marketers hoping to get their messages distributed as far and wide as possible, were highest on Mondays and Wednesdays, when they made up about 10% of the tweets per day.

Marketers should note, however, that qualitative categorizations have a degree of subjectivity. For example, Pear Analytics’ news category excluded news about technology and social media. And whenever a tweet might fall into multiple categories but began with “@,” it was deemed conversational.

I think that as more brands and consumers continue to participate in Twitter as well as the latest revelation that Facebook will now allow status updates from Facebook to flow to Twitter - the reversal of the one way street stand to absolutely put this data on it head.

For a snapshot in time it is interesting data nonetheless.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies