At the end of 2011, I hit 10,000 tweets. 10,000 times I musta decided I had something to say or share with the world.
If it took 10 seconds to write each tweet—and many take longer while I dig around for a special character, edit a photo, or head down the street to report breaking news, for Pete’s sake—then I spent a good 27 hours, 46 minutes & 40 seconds tweeting.
I saw the big 10k coming for a few days and planned to use it for something great, but my phone updates differently than the web & I missed it. My 10,000th tweet was this book cover. Perhaps a 2012 fortune cookie?
To make up for missing the big tweet, I used 10,001 to mark the occasion.
To celebrate my 10,000th tweet, I donated $10 to Care Canada (@CARE_CAN) for their work in the Congo. Peace on earth. ☮
Is spending more than a day of my life microblogging worth it?
Sure. Twitter feels critical. Twitter answers questions. Twitter serves news faster than any other channel.
Twitter lets me talk to everyone when I need to get my message to the most people, and to anyone when I want to share a thought with people I can’t reach any other way.
Twitter is media. It’s a global consciousness. It taught me to write short (not because you have to, but because it respects your audience & forces you to clarify your point) and to bastardize English forever with ampersands & emdashes.
It shows me different dimensions of the same friends & what it means to live in public.
Among all the nitpicking & general confusion around the new Twitter UI, it’s comforting to see our old friend, the ‘Twitter Go Mobile’ ad still greeting us inanely upon signout.
This drives me nuts because I access Twitter about 150,000 times/day from mobile. How can they not know that?
I have a better idea for this space: “Hey, we noticed you’ve signed out more than once today. Got several accounts? Here’s how to easily switch between them* without enduring the godforsaken clusterdance that is Twitter’s password autofill.”
And then present me with that helpful ability instead of the ultimate in rage-inducing untargeted advertising.
*Just realized this may be a feature & not a bug. Wrong-piping would surely spike if I was merrily flipping between accounts all day. Wouldn’t want to end up on next year’s 21 Most Horrific Social Media Facepalms.
My friend Alyson already wrote about this, but there are just so many great Twitter things going on here at once (frank politicians showing their usual grasp of social media, you-never-know-who’s-listening conversations with a good friend‘s boyfriend who is either deadpan hilarious or actually related to my Member of Parliament…) I had to record it for posterity.
If this was an American politician, he’d be fired before he even figured out the rest of us could see his tweet. Here in Canada, I don’t think we mind. We’ll see tomorrow
[edit 1] Yesterday Facebook’s news feed got all circley. Today, Twitter launches an in-stream image. G+ competition is making everyone step up their game!
[edit 2] Boo, the image appears as a link, not instream. Too little…
[edit 3] Well, it kinda appears instream. If you click on the tweet it shows like any media in the right-hand column, and if you link directly to a tweet it shows there too (I’m talking Twitter web interface here). This is the anticipated photosharing feature announced/leaked in May.
With the social media shakeup of recent weeks (G+ is great! LinkedIn is stupid! Klout is for a$$holes!) it’s time we all regroup, take a deep breath, and look at the data.
Mashable’s leaked iPhone 5 pics—sure to be a supertopic among techy, trendy, early-adopting social media peeps, our test audience—have garnered many a share since they came out 1 hour ago. And where are the socialites sharing said hardware porn?
On Twitter, friends. By a dramatic margin—a full 3/4 of shares. Despite Mashable’s sharing bias of highlighting G+.
Here’s that info restated as a hippocampus-friendly pie chart. Most of the pie is blue bird flavoured, and I think this represents the network zeitgeist as to where sharing has the most perceived value/enjoyment.
Sensing the “Hey, it’s way easier to share links & have a conversation about them here!” vibe over on G+, Twitter makes a play for strengthening your social graph. Import contacts, from, like, anywhere. Please?
Shrieking with excitement that the new iPhone OS will let me tweet my every move: this is some convenient $h1t. iPhone integration solidifies Twitter as an honest-to-God-not-going-anywhere-for-now Social Network, which is great because my most-loathed headline at the mo is “…the next [insert startup here]“.
So does this deal some sorta death blow to Facebook? Nope, IMO. Apple validating, elevating, anointing Twitter with iOS integration will not upset Facebook’s apple cart. Nor will it cause Twitter to become the universal login on Good Planet Earth. I’ll tell ya why.
1. The “world’s best known smartphone” is a small piece of the mobile OS pie.
A small marketshare decline for iOS is anticipated by 2015, according to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.
Likelihood of killing Facebook/making the universe choose Twitter to log in to stuff: well, 18.2%.
2. Not that many people use Twitter.
Pew says 13% of online adults have the ability to log in to stuff via Twitter. That’s up from 8% in November—except there’s a 3.7% margin of error, so it may be, um, not really up from November.
On the other hand, about half of folks in North America have Facebook identities with which to log in to stuff.
Likelihood of killing Facebook/making the universe choose Twitter to log in to stuff: Most folks use Facebook, therefore most logins are likely to come from that identity.
3. The Twitter/Apple crowd is an elite group.
People using both services—people who gravitate to both brands—aren’t the mainstream, both judging by the numbers above and by anecdotal stereotype of Apple Fanboy / self-obsessed early adopting tweeter. And they tend, by their sheer l33tness, to repel the ‘average user’.
Likelihood of killing Facebook/making the universe choose Twitter to log in to stuff: my BBM-fanboy brother-in-law did ask if we were on Twitter last weekend, and if we tweeted about our meals. So maybe the tipping point is on the horizon.
All that said, I will be logging in to everything possible via Twitter (just like I always do).
Twitter is my professional identity, my keepin’ it clean identity, my “you can’t stalk my family very easily from here” identity. Twitter is the networking party. Facebook is the living room after-drinks (and possibly pizza).
There are different audiences & contexts associated with the two identities. I’ll log in to things that advance me professionally via Twitter. The two networks don’t compete, in my life at least: they coexist as the snazzy Mon-Fri wardrobe does with The Weekend jeans.
It may be a good thing to separate your social graph from your public identity. Twitter is like a fence between the tranquility of your yard and the action on the street below.
Using Twitter as short, sweet, abbreviated identity suits my privacy concerns. Facebook’s messier, more intimate environment makes it a place to protect, to keep off limits from brand intrusions and the workosphere.
I suspect many who tweet avidly (ie, are more than aware of marketing and relating to the public) crave a peaceful online space where they don’t have to push their latest blog post, influence has no meaning, and they can talk politics or kids or whatever stuff doesn’t fall under the purview of “curation” for their “audience”.
Sadly, those same avid tweeters’ll wanna know your Klout score increases by about 4 points if you link your Facebook account
I think they should have went with @TheLC as their Twitter handle, though. Does anyone call it The Liquor Mart?
Interestingly, interactive plays a role in our new liquor paradigm, with
“enhanced product information and public interaction through an upgrading of the MLCC website”. —Bruce Owen, Winnipeg Free Press
MLCC, I realize the hilarious location-based drinking games practically program themselves, but if you need any help strategizing drunken public interaction fun, give me a dingle. I’m an expert.
The debate: do you want news orgs to use Twitter as RSS feeds & just deliver the headlines, or do you hope someone’s listening when current events get you riled up?
Prompted by a tweet to local that wondered if there was a headline-only feed (news “without all the adverts/soft news stories”), I polled my tweeps to see what they’re looking for in the tweets coming from big brand news accounts.
The unscientific result: close to a tie with the slight edge to people expecting interaction from this particular medium, citing the variety of options (RSS, apps) to get straight headlines.
I asked Probe Research Associate Curtis Brown if they were able to determine if all the people who report having Twitter accounts actually use it, but he explained it’s difficult in a short survey to get data that’s kinda subjective.
“Asking someone if they use Twitter or Facebook can be ambiguous, depending on how they “use” it, whereas asking people if they have an account is more clear-cut,” Curtis says.
7.3% is great news, because it shows Twitter is being adopted in Winnipeg, albeit more slowly than the rest of the country. Our Ikea isn’t here yet either, but that doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen, you know?
That’s 4,554,886 Canadians and 36,533,779 Americans, to put the percentage into perspective [Ed: see comments]. Twitter has greater penetration in Canada, but far more users in the US.
My jaw is on the floor for several reasons. One of them is the disparity between Canadian adoption & the apparent Winnipeg userbase,which clocks in at just over 1% (double checked here and here).
Another is comScore’s suggested worldwide penetration: 7.4% of humanity, or 510,406,873.That’s the same user base as Facebook, which you’d think would be making news over at Twitter. Their spokesperson says they have 200 million registered accounts, so either I don’t understand how to do percentages or something’s bizarre in the data. Someone please correct me if I’m misunderstanding what “worldwide penetration percentage” is.
ComScore doesn’t count mobile tweets, which Twitter says make up 40% of all tweets. In developing countries phones may be the only way Twitter is accessed, so there’s a portion of the userbase missing from the 7.4%. They also don’t monitor desktop apps like Seesmic, Tweetdeck & Hootsuite.
In the markets where comScore does analyze mobile tweets, they’re only able to report on Twitter.com itself used via mobile browser, and not the apps that are the most likely source of access.
Can Twitter really have such broad penetration? They did grow by some 20% in the past four months alone (160m users in September 2010—200m users in December 2010), so it’s possible—and exciting.
Twitter’s importance as a worldwide communication medium was solidified this week as Google announced a partnership with Twitter to develop Speak2Tweet—a means of phoning in tweets without the internet—in aid of Egyptians whose government silenced online communication. The tweet was singled out as the most critical delivery method for global voices.
Livetweeting. It gets you out from behind Seesmic—at least the way I do it—to stretch your legs and bring a little media to your social.
Last night I tweeted a 1000-person event from media conference in the morning to gala dinner at night. Here are my observations.
Breaking news & the MSM
As you know, I’ve been thinking about mainstream media’s role in information dissemination lately, and the media conference was a case in point. See these MSM guys standing there in their video pool, dutifully gathering the story for their news organizations? Before they’d even finished shooting I’d tweeted the whole story, with photos, out to our audience. They spread the news to their audiences.
A: that’s a lot for the MSM to contend with. They have standards of accuracy to adhere to that slow them down in their reporting, but they’re up against citizen journalists who have no such demands. It’s a much smaller deal for me to go back and delete a tweet or say “whoops!” if I make an error.
B: what’s the incentive for the media to cover your event if you’re scooping them so badly? Could livetweeting damage your org’s relationship with the MSM? If your news is big enough (or your Twitter audience small enough), it may not matter. Just something to think about.
Hotel wifi, a must for Apple Fanboys
Moving on to the evening event, I was stymied, as usual, by thick hotel ballroom walls. I cleverly (and swiftly, this time) got the credentials I needed to use local wifi.
I’ve seen livetweeted rooms with banks of laptops clicking away, but I like to do everything from my iPhone. I can get right up in the action, post Twitpics to illustrate the story, and check out all corners of the event.
The thing that worries me is that I appear to be standing there ignoring the heartfelt speech of someone very important as I type away on my phone. I hope people know what I’m doing—does it help if I pause to snap a photo?—but the majority of the live audience must think I’m shockingly rude. I’m calling right now for abright orange livetweeter vest that clarifies your totally unapparent but actually extremely intense interest in the real life proceedings.
Here you see HOT103′s Ace Burpee grinding the event to a halt to pose for my Twitpic, thereby highlighting my dinner-time cellphone use to an audience that included the Premier of Manitoba (who also generously, but less embarassingly, posed for a Twitpic). Bright orange vest, people.
I run two Twitter clients and two Twitpic uploaders simultaneously—well, as simultaneously as the iPhone will allow—so that I can talk to my personal network at the same time as the event’s audience. The two apps keep me from delivering commentary from the wrong source in a frantic environment.
The benefit of covering the event from multiple perspectives is that my personal audience, who may have no interest in the brand I’m working for, get exposed to some of what’s happening. This helps lend social proof-style credibility to the brand, build buzz & hopefully garner them a few more followers.
For this reason, it’s smart to use livetweeters with the biggest networks possible in your relevant niche or location.
Marketers know that more targeted efforts equal higher conversions. The more you know about your audience, the more you can appeal to them. In the age of content marketing, that means you get to create stuff people will actually like / use.
Digital is measurable. Psychographics and demographics can be aggregated or inferred. This is one of the aspects of digital marketing that draws me the most: the crisp, clean numbers attached to it. Ideas pass or fail. But extracting demographic data from social media profiles is just a little too emic.
What do I mean by “personal branding reasons”? The sort of stuff where you stretch the truth to indicate you’re not only from, say, Winnipeg. People trade up to more glamourous locales because, hey, they can.
In gathering Winnipeg social media demographics, I noted that it relied on self-reported location data. On Facebook this isn’t as much of an issue, because to make the most of Facebook users kind of need to associate themselves with a place (and Lord knows whether Facebook is providing advertisers with public data or, you know, the other kind. With $1.2 billion in ad revenue this year, they might not rely on self-reported stats. Ooh, imagine if they read your IP?). Anyhoo, Facebook has a very vested interest in providing accurate demographic data.
Twitter, however, is a more creative space (in that you present yourself as you want to be, not necessarily who you are) and, whether for privacy or personal branding reasons, some people don’t list an accurate location. Twitter has just released their ad platform to the public, though, so they’ll be getting serious about user demographics in the name of profit.
Sysomos recently released data (gleaned from over a billion tweets) that shows 31% of Twitter users don’t have a bio, and 18% don’t list a location. While this can’t be accurately mapped to Winnipeg numbers by any stretch of the imagination, it does highlight the need to take them as guidelines, not hard numbers. There’s a lot of (frustratingly) missing information.
What marketers need in Twitter demographic tools
Twitter is rolling out its own metrics platform now, and I’d like to see it include the following capabilites (for any @name), in compliance with ToS-determined privacy, of course:
A guess at what % are female & male
Accurate usercount for any location
The top hashtags for any location over day/month/year
The most active tweeters for any location or user over day/month/year
Trending topics over day/month/year for any location
Generate list or word cloud of follower’s bios
Generate list or word cloud of follower’s top hash tags
Generate list or word cloud of follower’s top mentioned words
Generate list of follower’s top @replied users (who they’re talking to the most)
A number of these rely on Twitter keeping tweets longer than the 4 weeks they currently do, which wold require a server farm colonizing Mars, so I’m not hopeful for this level of robustness. A few of them are a little creepy (though highly useful). If any app developers out there want to make my day/month/year, though, go for it
A recent eMarketer survey says 59% of Canadians are using social sites in 2010. What about here in the Peg? The numbers may surprise you / affect your marketing strategy.
Facebook use in Winnipeg
Here’s the demographic breakdown of Winnipeggers on Facebook, gathered from Facebook’s advertising platform. I’ve highlighted where I think the data is suspect [mainly due to teenage creativity]. Click the image to biggie-size.
What percentage of Winnipeg is that? A hefty 70%. You can make a pretty good case for your local business having a Facebook page at this point, especially with Facebook Places allowing people to broadcast the fact that they’re hanging out with you. Incentivize their endorsement with a nice coupon—Winnipeggers love that.
Twitter use in Winnipeg
And how ’bout microblogging platform Twitter? In Winnipeg, it’s not so much how many people are on Twitter as how many people aren’t.
This data is gathered from people self-identifying their location in their bios, so is subject to bullshit, but still. 6759 Winnipeggers, or 1.1% of our population, claim to be from the Peg. This is actually higher than the overall Canadian average (determined the same way) of 0.88%. [I've heard wildly different numbers for Canadian use, but this is an algorithm talking].
That said, I’ve met—virtually and IRL—lots of very cool Winnipeggers because of Twitter, and Biz Stone promised on Larry King a few weeks ago that he’s adding 300k users/day (American use is higher than Canadian at 8%). Watch for Twitter use to blow up here in the next 1-2 years, and get started buildin’ those relationships now.
Numerical caveats: Stats gathered from self-identified data are subject to inaccuracy, of course. Some people are valiantly fighting the inevitable by not providing their location data. And sadly, I’ve noticed Winnipeggers sidestepping their location in their Twitter bios as if it makes them less cool. On the contrary, we’re so cool we’re -40!
If you want to bring your “A” game to social media marketing (ie, if you have a product or service to move and need to show results), market research is critical. Having actual data can be quite a revelation, and applying it will lend direction to your social efforts if you’ve been flying sans strategie.
You might benefit from knowing:
What your competitors are talking about
Who’s interacting with them
Do you share any enthusiastic fans?
Where is your network from, who are they, and what gets a rise out them
What do they like, what do they share, & with whom?
Which tools can actually provide this kind of information, though? Which ones survived the boom of novelty Twitter development & aren’t languishing in a buggy perpetual beta twilight? Which ones deliver something more than a nebulous, inactionable percentage of supposed influence?
Here are the Twitter metrics tools I’m actually using that let you mine usernames for public data that, in aggregate, painstakingly copied into columns of a Google Doc (go on, click “graph”! It’s rewarding!), and scrutinized late into the night will yield a few nuggets of demographic gold.
Usefulness of data: Informative. Enlightening, almost.
Tells you what’s trending (being talked about the most) in your city. Good for identifying influencers (by username) and hot topics (by keyword or hashtag). If you chart this over time, patterns (genres) will emerge. This is 14 karat information if your market is 100% local.
Usefulness of data: Crucial if you need to export to Excel. Boolean search, OH YES.
I like the Archivist. It looks great and the development team reply PDQ to email & seem super cool. More importantly, you can do a boolean search (like “@username + special keywords”) and on the desktop app you can export the whole shebang to a spreadsheet (which sometimes, lets face it, you really need to do).
Update: As I wrote, the ability to export was being removed by the Archivists in order to comply with Twitter’s ToS . My copy of the desktop app continues to provide this functionality, but shhh. Note to @Twitter: Think of a way to make exporting ok. People need it to build their own spreadsheets for thorough metrics, and to track stuff like tweeted contest entries. Help us to help you.
Tells you exactly what tweets got you (or anyone else) followed or unfollowed, so it’s pretty darn helpful for tweaking your wording/subject matter on a minute level. May cause uncomfortable cringing as you reread your most boorish, follower-shedding tweets. Can lead to paralyzing narcissism.
A location search (“loc:yourcity”) will give you a ballpark of the size of your market. You can sort by follower size, if schmoozing the influential is your bag.
Good for identifying influencers and dominant subject matter (hashtags, topics). Track what’s being talked about most by specific people (influencers or comepetitors). If a user is in conversation with a few of your competitors, you’ve got yourself an industry mover & shaker with whom you might want to get friendly.
Have to log in? No. So you can see competitor‘s info?Yep.
A cautionary tale about pretty faces on Twitter. What does the rabbit have against microblogging? Warning: this video is from an earlier time, when racism against skunks was culturally acceptable.
Look, “tweet” in French is the same as in English. In linguistics that’s called a “loanword”, but I just know that because I’m about to ace my Cultural Anthropology exam.
At the end of 2011, I hit 10,000 tweets. 10,000 times I musta decided I had something to say or share with the world.
I saw the big 10k coming for a few days and planned to use it for something great, but my phone updates differently than the web & I missed it. My 10,000th tweet was this book cover. Perhaps a 2012 fortune cookie?
