Recently, you may have noticed that Twitter has undergone a subtle shift in emphasis. The homepage has been altered and now displays the latest trending topics. Instead of focusing on what people are doing, it encourages you to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” and “join the conversation”.
This may be a long-term strategic plan by Twitter to shift towards a real-time source of world news by millions of citizen journalists. But whatever the ultimate intention behind these changes, it got us thinking about the reason why people use Twitter.
Then we found the recent Pear Analytics Twitter study, which studied 2,000 tweets to identify how people are using Twitter.
The Test
Over the course of two weeks, during the hours of 11am and 5pm, 2,000 tweets were taken from the main Twitter timeline and divided into one of six categories. The results were then collated to reveal the most popular use of Twitter.
The Factors
a. Sample Size - Based on an estimated 3 million tweets per day in the U.S., the sample size of 2,000 tweets was deemed to be sufficient to provide the potential for statistically meaningful results.
b. Categories - Tweets were categorized into one of these groups;
- News - Mainstream news of the type you might find on the major news stations, not including tech news or social media news
- Spam - For example, “See how I got 2,000 followers overnight”
- Self-Promotion - Tweets that specifically try to sell a product or service
- Pointless Babble - I’m eating a sandwich, My cat has just… etc Tweets with no “@”, “RT”, “Via” or Short URL which did not appear to be useful to more than 50% of that person’s followers
- Conversational - Back and forth tweets between people and tweets designed to engage conversation such as questions and polls
- Pass-Along Value - Tweets that include the letters RT
Of the few tweets that could be included in more than one category, they were classified as conversation if they included an @ symbol.
c. Public Timeline - The tweets were sampled from the main public timeline every 30 minutes from 11:00am till 5:00pm over the course of 10 week days.
The Results
Of the 2,000 tweets studied, the results were as follows;
- News - 72 Tweets - 3.6%
- Spam - 75 Tweets - 3.75%
- Self Promotion - 117 - 5.85%
- Pointless Babble - 811 - 40.55%
- Conversational - 751 - 37.55%
- Pass Along Value - 174 - 8.70%
Delving deeper into the results there are several points worth noting;
a. The most popular time for pass along value tweets was at 11:30am CST every morning with another mini spike between 4:00pm and 4:30pm CST every afternoon. For maximum impact, Monday exhibited a higher proportion of these pass along tweets than any other day of the week, which makes this a good time to post information if you want it re-tweeted for maximum coverage.
b. News based tweets were most common at 2:00pm CST on Tuesday.
c. Conversational tweets peaked between 2:00pm and 4:00pm CST every day, with the heaviest flow on Tuesday.
d. Spam continued to appear at the same broad rate all day, every day.
e. Despite appearances to the contrary, the overall level of self-promotion (5.85%) and spam (3.75%) was much lower than many people expected.
Although in the case of spam, people have widely varying definitions of what constitutes spam. One person’s meat is another person’s spam.
And as far as self-promotion is concerned, it would be almost impossible for their study to include people who promote their own websites, so the actual figure for this category is likely to be much higher.
However, the general perception that self-promotion is more prevalent than it actually is, indicates that many people are disproportionately annoyed by it. This tends to indicate that Twitter is best used as a way of building relationships with potential customers rather than blatant selling.
The Criticisms
Several people have criticized the contents of this report. Many people have claimed that the categories could be more relevant, while others have pointed out that taking the sample of tweets from the public timeline is not an accurate representation of the kind of tweets any user would elect to receive.
Obviously the composition of tweets that any one user receives is dictated by the Twitter users that they follow. For example, if you follow the Twitter accounts managed by all the main news channels, you would receive a higher proportion of news tweets etc.
But that wouldn’t show how people were using Twitter in general, just how the selected users have chosen to use their account.
The Conclusion
As a result of the coverage achieved by this report a vigorous debate developed about the real meaning of Twitter. Many people claim that they don’t use it because of all the pointless chatter, while others complain about the developing commercialization of the network.
One of the top Twitter users Stephen Fry even weighed into the debate in his usual eloquent style, claiming that Twitter was never promoted as anything other than a communication tool and that he was disappointed in the 60% of tweets that weren’t irrelevant chatter.
“The clue’s in the name of the service: Twitter. It’s not called Roar, Assert, Debate or Reason, it’s called Twitter. As in the chirruping of birds.”
Ultimately, there’s no right or wrong way to use Twitter. Twitter is a communication tool, but beyond that it’s up to the individual to decide what they think it should be used for.
And one of the best ways to keep control of the tweets that appear in your main timeline (beyond careful selection of the people that you follow) is to use Philtro. Through a process of giving messages in your Twitter stream thumbs up or down, this clever service learns the type of tweets that you want to read and filters the rest. So if you follow people who post interesting tweets some of the time and irrelevant rubbish the rest, you can keep the good stuff without having to unfollow them.
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