Is Twitter Usage Always Meaningful

During the SuperBowl, @kevinweil and the others on the Twitter analytics team tracked SuperBowl and Brand tweets to create the seeminmgly insightful graph below. I love graphs and infographics.If I had my way, half our R&D budget would go against visualizations.

But what does this one actually tell us?

Communal Chatter

It is one thing when Twitter helps us see a grand (and terrible) event like the Mumbai attacks from many perspectives or when it allows us each to share a personal pov or experience that others may find useful or relatable. It is another when we are all watching the same edited TV broadcast. Sure the polling function of how many folks liked the Google ad is kind of interesting.

As Kevin shares:

"The second half began with a bang as @TheSaints recovered a surprise onside kick, and for the next minute 44% of all worldwide tweets were about football. Chatter around brands had meanwhile dropped to much lower levels until @Google's Parisian Love commercial sparked viewers once more. Excitement around the game grew steadily with large peaks following scores and turnovers up until the final moments. As the game ended, one out of every two tweets on Twitter was about the Super Bowl!"

I was much more active on Twitter during the game last year. This year, I knew there woudl be a broad community of Twitter users commenting on game highlights and commercials but it just didn't seem that interesting to tweet, "I liked the Google advert - clever and with a lot of heart..." even though I did.

Still, I love a good graph.

Comments

[Vsistla]

Your line - I knew there woudl be a broad community of Twitter users commenting on game highlights and commercials but it just didn't seem that interesting to tweet - reminded me of Yogi Berra's famous quote - It got so crowded that no one goes there anymore.

Assuming this feeling pervades through larger Twitter users, there will be a good chunk of users either stop using Twitter or just be on the sidelines watching what others have to say using "such" trending events. That is a big problem for Twitter and also for brands in the long run.

This means, in a trending topic, marginal value of n+1 th Tweet of a particular opinion or thought diminishes in value.

I think this phenomenon of "Tweet Value Inflation" leads to "Deflation of Tweets" in those trending topics as well as in the long run.