Or what types of conversations are happening on twitter? We decided to run some statistics to find the answer. Basically, we divided twitter messages into three different categories: (i) Messages that are posted in response to other messages, (ii) Messages that are forwards or re-tweets of other tweets, and (iii) Messages that contains URLs, which could be pass along links or news story or link to blogs or of commercial purpose like deals/coupons/etc. We were thinking of having more categories – especially categorizing links into different buckets: news, promotion, etc but then decided against it. On social media platform like Twitter, there is a thin (and subjective) line between personal and professional content & usage. Is tweet with link to my blog, a news item for my friends or self marketing?
We collected data for a period of one month (Oct 09) on range of different companies, brands and topics. All in all, there were over 1 million tweets that were classified into 3 different buckets. Here are results:
- 15.8% of tweets were part of conversation, replies in response to other tweets.
- 5.9% of tweets were forwards or re-tweets of other tweets
- 40.7% of tweets contained at least one URL.
I must say, % of tweets with URL(s) is staggering high. It also differs vastly from
this study by Pear Analytics that gained wide attention few months ago. Couple of differences that I would like to point out between Pear Analytics study and our study: (1) While Pear Analytics study examined roughly 2000 tweets, our study examined over 1 mil tweets, and (2) I think the main difference between the two studies is that the Pear Analytics study examined random tweets whereas we targeted specific content (for example, content related to Best Buy, Wal Mart, or Healthcare reform, Halloween etc), which in turn could have helped filter out lot of “pointless babbel” that Pear Analytics study mentions.
Why is this important? Most of the content with links is references to news items that users think their friends/followers find useful, self promotion, or commercial like deals, coupons, etc. When Twitter started out, it was based on a simple idea: know what your friends are doing. However, as the service grew, its users have also found other uses of the service besides posting “I’m having big burrito guilty feeling”.
Percentage of tweets with links for the month of November so far? 42.6%, while other numbers (for re-tweets and conversations) are roughly same as that of Oct 09 figures.
For more information on our ContextMine product and how it can help, visit our product site at
http://www.context.com/contextmine. If you are interested in trial version, send us an email at: dshah at context.com