Whether Twitter is a mental vacuum depends on how you use it
SemanticHacker embarked on a very interesting study which will be useful and thought-provoking for anyone who uses Twitter as a marketing tool either for themselves, their blog or their company. The study is documented in this post and revolves around the question “How informative is Twitter?”. But let’s look at the figures from a slightly different angle first, we are going to come back to that question later.
First thing that surprised me was the low amount of retweets. In this study a corpus of about 8.9 million tweets was used. Only 6% were actually retweets. Which means that the response generated by “interesting” content on Twitter is lower than one might expect or harder to get. Since a retweet mostly is a simple copy of an already tweeted message though, this does indicate on the other hand that most tweets (94% – probably less, since spam etc. needs to be excluded) do carry a unique message not produced through simply repeating what someone else said.
The first chart contains one of the most important pieces of information though:
What was flabbergasting to me, is not how many “undefined” messages were detected because people don’t bother to spell properly anymore (I expected more here actually), but how little other languages are spoken on Twitter. Now everyone is jumping on the “Twitter and social networks as the new marketing tools” train (here is an article about a company using social networks and a strong community to build their amazing success story). Nowadays every company receives the advice from their press agency to create a Twitter account, but not only in English speaking countries -everywhere. I’ve had smaller projects (German sites) where I created Twitter accounts as well and used them to share the information posted on my sites, build a community and generate traffic. But according to these figures and also my personal experience the potential is still way to low if your account needs to attract non English-speaking visitors. Of course, this does not take into account people who communicate in English but live in another country. Still, the audience you’ll reach in specific countries will be very limited.
The study was concluded by taking a sample of approximately 1000 tweets and classifying the messages in several “types” to see how much informative content was actually produced on the network:
One very interesting fact is that only about 4-8% (including product recommendations) are considered to be advertise. Which is less than I expected actually and shows that there is still potential for “integrated” advertise, which will be used by Twitter and other services like Ad.ly eventually – whether this might be welcomed by Twitterers or not.
The question that this study tried to answer though, is how much of the messages produced on Twitter could be considered as relevant information for a broader audience. According to these numbers it doesn’t seem to be much – barely 20% maybe. But there are three things that need to be taken into account before considering the network a “mental vacuum“:
- How many good news sites do you know and how many are you actively using on a daily basis to inform yourself about what you want to know? Probably about a handful. And it’s the same thing for Twitter. Most people search to consolidate information and find it in 1-2 places instead of having everything scattered. It’s mostly the same few / popular Twitter accounts people will follow to stay informed on a certain topic. Compare to that the sheer amount of people who use Twitter for private purposes (e.g. conversations) and the small percentage of real “information” becomes self evident actually.
- A user’s current status can also be considered some sort of information. Just an example: Think about the vast follower base celebrities like Miley Cyrus have managed to attract meanwhile. Those followers do consider the personal status of a celebrity as relevant information which they used to receive from tabloids before.
- And most importantly, Twitter is really about how you use it – just like the Internet itself. It’s about the people you choose to follow and the features you can use meanwhile to filter tweets and access information in a much more selective way (e.g. lists). I’m certain that as the use of Twitter evolves and people learn to handle the large stream of messages that run through any given Twitter account daily, the network will be used more for exchanging valuable information because one will be able to make sure that it actually reaches the desired audience.
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Girl Goes Tech (GGT) is about a 26-year-old, female tech-addict exploring her geeky side and writing about social media, mobile trends and applications.