This is a guest post by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, a on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup that helps online businesses measure, manage, and monetize better. He was previously a venture capital analyst and currently serves as an advisor to several New York startups. Robert blogs at The Metric System and can be followed on Twitter at @RJMetrics.

A few weeks ago, my former employer led a $100 million investment into Twitter and I must admit that I was quite jealous of my former colleagues. Chances are they got the opportunity to do some very cool analytics on Twitter’s data.

Rather than wonder about what I missed, I decided to figure out what I could from the outside looking in. Using some statistical trickery, the Twitter API, and my RJMetrics dashboard, I uncovered a ton of astonishing new information about Twitter. Here are some highlights:

• Twitter’s user growth is no longer accelerating. The rate of new user acquisition has plateaued at around 8 million per month.
• Over 14% of users don’t have a single follower, and over 75% of users have 10 or fewer followers.
• 38% of users have never sent a single tweet, and over 75% of users have sent fewer than 10 tweets.
• 1 in 4 registered users tweets in any given month.
• Once a user has tweeted once, there is a 65% chance that they will tweet again. After that second tweet, however, the chance of a third tweet goes up to 81%.
• If someone is still tweeting in their second week as a user, it is extremely likely that they will remain on Twitter as a long-term user.
• Users who joined in more recent months are less likely to stop using the service and more likely to tweet more often than users from the past.

Read on for some detailed charts a deeper dive into the data.

How We Did It

In most cases, this kind of outside-looking-in exercise wouldn’t be possible. Twitter, however, is a special case for a few reasons:

• The company is pre-revenue, so its value is wrapped up in user activity and engagement
• A Twitter user’s activity data (tweets, followers, etc) is all public by default
• Twitter’s API allowed me to automatically download up to 20,000 data points per hour
• Twitter uses auto-incrementing ID numbers (1,2,3,4…) for both users and tweets
• The central limit theorem tells us, among other things, that a large enough random subset of a large data set will behave like its parent set with a high degree of statistical confidence

In the end, our sample size consisted of about 85,000 users and just over 3 Million tweets. By piecing all of these things together and pulling the data into the RJMetrics Dashboard, I was able to chart loads of information about Twitter’s user base and user behavior. I’ve looked around, and this appears to be the largest public analysis of Twitter’s user base online. Enjoy!

Number of Twitter Users

This analysis leverages the fact that Twitter uses auto-incrementing ID numbers for both users and tweets. We identified the range of IDs that were consumed by the system in any given month and the percentage of them actually tied to real Twitter accounts. (“Dead” IDs are likely canceled accounts, SPAM accounts, test accounts, etc.) In combination, these numbers give us a reliable approximation of how many new users joined Twitter each month:

This shows us the exponential growth experienced by Twitter in 2009. In Q3, this plateaus at a rate of about 8 million new users per month. A chart of total cumulative users is below:

Hockey, anyone? As of September 1st, the actual number of live Twitter accounts was just above 50 million.

Average Number of Followers

According to the data, the average Twitter user has 42 followers. It’s interesting to see the distribution of users by the number of people following them:

As you can see, the vast majority of users have ten or fewer followers, and over 20% have no followers at all! As we know, most users have been on the system for less than a year and, as shown in the chart below, the number of followers is proportional to the user’s time since joining:

Number of Tweets

It’s also interesting to look at the number of status updates, or “tweets” made by the average user. Obviously, the number of tweets from any given user grows over time (per the trend shown in the chart below):

When we look at the distribution of tweets by user, we see a very surprising trend: over 75% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times.

“Protected” (Private) Twitter Profiles

Before moving onto analyses at the tweet level, it’s important to note that some of the users we identified have “protected” their tweets, meaning we were able to see how many followers they had and how many times they had tweeted, but were unable to download specific tweets (and, more importantly, tweet times).

The chart below shows how many users in our data set are “protected” by the month they joined. The overall number sits around 10% (and dropping):

Also interesting is how “protected” Twitter users differ from public users. As shown in the charts below, protected users tend to tweet far more often, but have far fewer followers:

Power Users

Another limitation of the API is that it can only return the 3,200 most recent tweets for any given user. This is obviously not a big deal for most users, but there are some users out there who have passed that mark. Our sample data set showed that less than 0.02% of Twitter users have sent more than 3,200 tweets. These users will have incomplete data sets in our study, but the population is so small that they should not have any meaningful impact on our conclusions.

Tweets by Source

It’s interesting to see how different tweeting methods have risen up over time. Below I show the most popular methods and what percent of Twitter traffic came through them each month since 2007:

The web clearly dominates this list. Let’s exclude it to get a closer look at which other sources are driving tweets:

Twitterriffic has clearly seen better days, and text messages (txt) have been declining as a channel, as well. Meanwhile, TweetDeck appears to be aggressively gobbling up market share.

Time Between Tweets

Since we know the timestamp of every tweet in our sample data set, we can study the time between tweets and the recency of tweets from the userbase.

Remarkably, the average time between any two tweets from the same user is exactly 24 hours.

The chart below shows the average amount of time between tweets for a user’s first ten tweets (when applicable). The x-axis contains the time of the tweet in question, and the value is the average amount of time since the previous tweet.

Surprisingly, the time between Tweets actually drops as users do more tweeting. However, this could be biased by the fact that most users have tweeted fewer than ten times. To clear things up, let’s look at the average time between tweets based on how many times the user has tweeted:

Indeed, as you might expect, users who send more tweets also tweet more frequently, and the dropoff is quite significant.

Probability of Incremental Tweets

Since there is such a huge dropoff in tweeting activity up until the 10 tweets mark, we thought it might be interesting to look at the “probability of an incremental tweet” based on how many tweets a given user has completed. This can be calculated with just a few clicks in RJMetrics:

As you might expect, with every Tweet a user performs, their chance of tweeting again goes up.

Active Tweeters

We know that Twitter has 50 million registered users, but we also know that the vast majority of them have tweeted fewer than ten times. Let’s investigate just how many of these registered users are actually actively tweeting.

Using our tweet data, we can identify what percent of the user base sent out at least one tweet in any given month. This “unique tweeters” statistic is charted below (to get a fair statistic we excluded protected accounts from our denominator):

The number seems to hover in the 25% range. In other words, only about 1 in 4 registered users is actually tweeting in any given month. (Although it’s worth noting that some users may only be using Twitter to read others’ tweets, meaning they are not full-fledged “zombie” accounts.)

Notice the bump in early 2009, right around the time when new user growth began to accelerate aggressively. This suggests the obvious: on average, a newer user is more likely to tweet than an older user. When new user growth exploded in early 2009, the concentration of new users became denser, driving this average up. To illustrate this (and get a better look at how users behave over their lifetime), we turn to cohort analysis.

Cohort Analysis

A cohort analysis is a great way to look at user behavior and loyalty over time. Each line in the chart below represents a different “cohort” of Twitter users based on the month they joined (we chose 7 cohorts from different time periods to avoid clutter). In the chart below, we monitor what percent of the users in each cohort come back to tweet again in each month after having tweeted in the first month. Obviously, month 1 is 100% by definition:

This is quite a telling chart:

• There is an expected usage dropoff in month 2, but after that point usage holds predictably steady. This is great news for anyone trying to forecast user activity early on in a new user’s lifetime.
• The newer cohorts, despite being significantly larger in size, actually consist of more loyal users. The two highest lines are also the two most recent, meaning that users who joined in 2009 are actually more likely to keep tweeting after their first month than those who joined in the same month in 2008.

Since the dropoff in Month 2 is quite pronounced, let’s zoom in and look at weekly cohorts to see if we can see how usage drops off at the weekly level:

We see a similar pattern here, although more recent cohorts don’t stand out as much as in the monthly analysis. Again, however, the dropoff in the second period doesn’t seem to further decline as time goes on. This means that by the second week of a cohort’s lifetime, Twitter can reliably predict its users’ future behavior as a group.

Another cohort analysis that might be interesting is to look at how many tweets a cohort makes each month after joining. This metric will incorporate both the dropoff in usage from the users who churn in the first month and the uptick in activity from users who stay on the platform:

Wow! This is a remarkable image. Despite the massive dropoff in users after the first month, the tweeting activity from the users who are left is so voluminous that it makes the “tweets per month” of each cohort average over 100% (and, as before, the more recent cohorts are the more loyal)!

In other words, the users who stick around actually tweet so frequently (and at such a rapid pace compared to their first month) that they more than make up for the lost activity of those who churned after the first month. This is a very powerful and unexpected statistic.

Conclusion

Everyone has their own feelings about Twitter’s reported $1 billion valuation. I hope this article gave you a taste of what its new investors likely considered before coming up with that number.

July 28th, 2009 | by Ben Parr

Twitter now has a brand spankin’ new homepage. Of course, if you’re a regular TwitterTwitter user, you’re rarely going to see it because you’re already logged in. But for the 5 billion+ people Twitter has yet to convert, it provides the company’s big chance to get them to sign up and stay on their website.

So what’s Twitter’s big ace-in-the-hole? Well, just look at what the company puts in your face when you arrive: trending topics. Not just 8 or 10 topics, but 23 topics that represent the collective discussion of the entire world. Twitter’s no longer about updating your friends, but about being THE place for global events.

Evidence

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

And here’s the new text:

“Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”

You immediately notice the deemphasis on your personal network – the people you live, sleep, and work with – and the focus on realtime discovery and world events. Twitter’s stepped away from being branded as a social network, or being compared to FacebookFacebook.

The second big change is search – specifically the trending topics. The company not only makes sure you realize that the Twitterverse is talking about things you care about (whether it’s pitcher Mark Buehrle or Blue M&Ms), but it explains them with a conversation bubble that appears when you hover over the question mark icon.

Even bigger, Twitter provides an explanation of the trending topics. The explanations are pulled from What the Trend, although it looks like the explanations aren’t updated in realtime. So how do they decide which trending topics get homepage explanations? How long does it take for it to appear? Could it be abused?

We’ll get the answers later, but the significance of explaining trends to a potential user is huge. Everything is geared towards a curious onlooker seeing that Twitter is the place to have a conversation about anything that’s anything in the world.

Twitter’s Changing Directions

Now Twitter has taken away that focus, and in its place, Twitter is focusing on the entire world. There’s not a single reference to you in Twitter’s new explanation. We think we understand why, because we hear this reason for not joining Twitter all the time:

“I just don’t have anything to say.”
“I don’t need to update people on my life.”
“It’s for people with followings and something to promote, not for me.”

Emphasizing that Twitter is the world’s platform for realtime information, for being connected to the entire world, is a savvy move on the part of Twitter. People who have something to promote are already on Twitter. Now the company has to convert the people who think Twitter’s just about telling people about what cereal you ate.

Branding Twitter as the one place where you are plugged in to the collective world makes it tougher to ignore. You can say “I don’t feel like updating people on my life,” but it’s far tougher to say “I don’t care about what’s happening in the world.”

Welcome to Twitter, the hotspot of cultural and global relevance. Welcome to Twitter, Version 2.

July 27th, 2009 | by Sharlyn Lauby

Sharlyn Lauby is the president of Internal Talent Management (ITM) which specializes in employee training and human resources consulting. She authors a blog at hrbartender.com.

I admit I’m a Twitter addict. I enjoy the flurry of tweets and the variety of information my followers share with me. But even though I like the variety, it’s still important for me to feel some sort of connection to the people and companies I follow. On the people side, the way I connect is by getting to know someone’s personality. It’s the same if I’m following a company. Where the person is offering personality, the company is successfully tweeting their corporate culture.

But if all you’re doing is sending out auto-tweets, I’m not sure either of us is getting the full benefit of your presence on TwitterTwitter. Some people don’t like communicating with a company logo. But when a company offers a pleasant look and feel, and tweets out information of value to customers, then it is possible to connect with them. Here are 7 suggestions (along with some Twitter examples) for establishing a rock-solid corporate culture on Twitter:

1. Share Your History

Another historic moment is when an organization grows and expands, especially in the current economic climate. Dunkin’ Donuts did a great job announcing their entry into the Birmingham market.

2. Talk Vision and Mission

His point is well taken. People want to be engaged with companies that look engaging. Think about the purpose of your organization. Twitter can be a place to talk about goals, plans and offer a glimpse of what life is like at your place of work.

3. Reveal Industry Insights

Another company setting the standard in this area is Pandora Radio. When a piece of legislation that could impact their business was introduced in the U.S. Senate, they turned to Twitter to educate listeners. They regularly updated their followers on the progress of the legislation. And, they thanked their tweeps for the support. (Very important!)

4. Recognize Employees

First, they very smartly tweet about their company’s commitment to diversity. As a reader, this speaks volumes about what’s important to Marriott as a company. Second, I have been equally impressed with the sensitivity they expressed for their associates and others during the recent tragedy in Jakarta. That puts a very human face on the corporate Twitter account.

5. Profile Customer Successes

Jessica Lee, senior employment manager for APCO Worldwide, feels that as Twitter matures we’ll start seeing companies share more of their own and their clients’ successes. “I personally like sharing even the very smallest things – clients wanting to get more involved in social media, or how our own Facebook Fan Page is growing – because it’s exciting to see the growth along with new and different ways of being applied in the business world.”

DAXKO, meanwhile, is combining the popularity of Twittering by their customers with their company user’s conference by setting up a Twitter account for the conference. According to Dunn, they’ll use the site to “live tweet from the conference so our customers that couldn’t attend can follow what’s going on and hopefully get some value out of it.”

6. Be Responsive

Much of the success attributed to @ComcastCares is their responsiveness. Dunn agrees. “I think I’d rather have no Twitter account than an account that wasn’t responding to replies or DMs within 5 to 10 minutes. Customers that are savvy enough to use Twitter are going to expect a lot of responsiveness.”

And, it’s not only how fast you respond but how you respond. Lee reminds us that “whether your customer is a consumer of your product or service, or in my case, a potential employee who is interested in working for APCO – the tone should still be conversational and friendly. And ultimately, you want it to be an extension of yourself and a reflection of your organization’s culture.”

7. Ask Questions About the Future

Or, what do you want to see in our tweets?

As a consumer, I love it when companies ask me for my opinion. It shows me they care about me and what I have to say. And, I love it even more when I see a company take suggestions and ideas seriously.

Conclusion

Use the examples in this post as the starting point for a conversation or training session about Twitter best practices and your corporate culture. By sharing with your team the right way to leverage Twitter, we can all celebrate our successes together. If you know any other good examples of companies using Twitter to share their corporate culture in a positive way, please share them in the comments.

July 23rd, 2009 | by Ben Parr

We know that Twitter’s rising rapidly in popularity. We also know that a huge number of Twitter users don’t stick around. So what’s a company with a user retention problem to do? Launch a guide to using its own product, of course.

Just minutes ago, Twitter released Twitter 101 for Business, a guide for getting started with using the Twitter service. It covers the basics of Twitter, how to get started, the lingo, and includes case studies. Here’s how Twitter describes its value to businesses on its new Twitter 101 website:

Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.

Will this get more business on Twitter, and more importantly, will it fix Twitter’s user retention problem? It probably can’t hurt. In fact, we launched our own Twitter Guide Book to help people understand and learn more about Twitter as well.

by Julie Posetti, May 27, 2009

Twitter became big news once journalists realized its power as a tool for breaking stories during the Mumbai Massacre in 2008. In the aftermath of the micro-blogging platform hitting the headlines, there was an explosion of professional journalists in the Twittersphere. This growth has been fueled by increasing mainstream awareness of the importance of social media to the future of a crisis-ridden industry and the elevation of Twitter as a platform for news dissemination, citizen journalism and audience interaction.

So, how are journalists using Twitter? How is the service changing traditional reporting practices and what (if any) are the rules of engagement with the platform for professional journalists? I interviewed 25 of the journalists I follow on Twitter (most of them Australian with a smattering of South African and U.S. respondents) to find out first-hand.

This is the first installment in a two-part MediaShift series on the theme of journalists and Twitter.

Twitter-mania

Black Saturday (Pic. courtesy News Ltd)

In Australia, where journalists are literally in a Twittering frenzy, the platform was incorporated into mainstream news coverage of the Black Saturday bushfires which devastated the southern state of Victoria in February. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), where I used to work, pioneered the use of the technology during the disaster with impressive results.

And last week, during violent storms and flooding in the states of Queensland and New South Wales (NSW), it was evident how embedded Twitter had become as a component of ABC radio’s breaking news coverage. Reporters from remote regions through to network stars and even the corporation’s Managing Director are Tweeting their way into unprecedented public engagement. As Leigh Sales, anchor of the respected nightly news program Lateline, told me: “I’m giving Twitter a red hot go.”

But as I watched my Twitter-feed flood with news of the deadly storms, I saw something else racing up the trending topics chart: the London industry gathering #media140 called to discuss the role of Twitter in breaking news. Inevitably, the debate canvassed the views of resistors and detractors who argued “Twitter isn’t journalism.” Sound familiar to veterans of the great blogging vs. journalism debate? Of course Twitter isn’t journalism, it’s a platform like radio or TV but with unfettered interactivity. However, the act of tweeting can be as journalistic as the act of headline writing. Similarly, the platform can be used for real-time reporting by professional journalists in a manner as kosher as a broadcast news live report.

Evidence of resistance was also broadcast in Australia this month on the national ABC radio program Life Matters. In an episode devoted to the impact of social media, host Richard Aedy declared himself a skeptic and said he didn’t see the point of platforms like Twitter. He found some support within his audience — an older, educated, affluent crowd (disclaimer: I’m a regular listener!). But many called the program to describe how social media such as Twitter could be useful social connectors and information sources. While one of his guests plugged the virtues of Twitter, another, respected veteran science broadcaster Robin Williams ridiculed the platform, proudly telling listeners he was very connected and yet didn’t even have a mobile phone.

However, the producers invited lillsteners to participate in the discussion via Twitter and the experiment was a success. Twitter users — some of whom had never previously heard the program — tweeted their way through it, posting hundreds of comments and making an impression on the skeptical host. I was invited to appear on the next edition of the program to discuss the Twitter political reporting experiment I conducted last September with my students and the emerging role of Twitter in journalism. By that stage, there was less “But isn’t it just inane public belly-gazing” and more “It strikes me this is a little like citizen journalism,” which was good to hear as the program’s weekly talkback sessions are a natural bridge to social media enhancement and potentially a younger, expanded audience.

Nevertheless, Twitter (in conjunction with other social media platforms) is changing journalism and these changes need to be carefully scrutinized with open minds.

How do journalists identify themselves on Twitter?

Most of the journalists I interviewed tweet openly, acknowledging their professional identity and real name in their personal Twitter page biographies, even if they use an online nickname. Only one locked his account, meaning he had to approve potential followers before they would be able to view his tweets. However, several deliberately withheld the name of their employer to avoid perceived conflicts of interest.

But the themes of trust and credibility, honesty and transparency came up constantly as significant features of successful social media engagement and most of the journalists I interviewed had connected the dots.

“Because I use Twitter to source content (and) find news tips, I think it’s best to be open about where I’m coming from,” said Gary Kemble, the ABC’s Online Opinion Editor. He’s also responsible for the broadcaster’s @abcnews and @articulate Twitter feeds.

The ABC’s national youth affairs correspondent, Michael Turtle agreed.

“I think the very nature of Twitter lends itself towards having an open profile and being honest about who you are,” he said. “The power of the site is the ability to connect directly with people and engage in conversations. It wouldn’t be nearly as effective if you chose to do that anonymously.”

When asked why he tweeted openly, John Grey, online editor of the Murdoch-owned Brisbane Courier Mail, said: “Call me wacky, call me weird, but I think people are more likely to have an interactive relationship with a human rather than a bot.”

Freelance journalist Rachel Hills acknowledged her upfront tweeting as being consistent with the need for interactivity between the reporter and the audience in the digital age.

“I have adopted this relatively open approach because I view the future of media (or at least the kind of ideas and issues based work that I do as a freelancer) as being about hosting and facilitating conversations — interacting with the people who care about the work that you do is vital,” she said.

However, ABC Adelaide news reader and producer, Jacqui Munn reflected the caution that some journalists feel about the merger of the private and the public that occurs in social media spaces like the Twittersphere. She switched from tweeting openly to anonymously once her journalistic identity was revealed.

“I wasn’t looking to use it to communicate as a journalist and didn’t feel comfortable being judged professionally for just shooting the breeze with friends and other somewhat anonymous acquaintances,” Munn said.

How are journalists using Twitter?

Professional journalists are using Twitter to enhance and augment traditional reporting practices. It’s another tool in their kit and many journalists, like ABC radio producer Andrew Davies, are now logged onto Twitter throughout their working day.

“I try and start my day by looking at what people are saying (and) talking about on Twitter,” he said, “I love being able to read all the fantastic links to interesting websites, ideas (and) news that people have sent out.”

Reporters I interviewed are using the platform to “broadcast” links to content they or their news outlet have produced in an effort to build a new audience. Some also contribute to or manage organizational Twitter accounts on behalf of their employers. A few use it as a live reporting platform and some employ applications to share images, audio and links to other online content they find interesting. Many are using it to crowdsource contacts, story angles, background and case studies. In fact, when I began researching this story, my first move was to tweet a request for journalists to respond to questions about why they were on Twitter and how they used the platform. I received useful feedback and uncovered a number of new contacts via this method before conducting more extensive online interviews.

The ABC’s Michael Turtle uses Twitter regularly to monitor public debate which he acknowledges influences his storytelling.

“It sometimes helps to use Twitter to gauge opinion on an issue,” Turtle said. “You would certainly never claim the views online are representative, or seek to pass off a collection of tweets as an accurate poll. But it can point you in the direction of certain views, which can help guide some of the questions you might ask or angles you might follow-up.”

Most journalists I interviewed monitor the feeds of sources on their beats as an adjunct to website and email accounts. They check their competition and try to keep up to date with hot industry issues. For some, it’s replaced their RSS news feeds and for others it’s a way of networking with peers and developing mentors. It’s the end-of-day bar debriefing and a reporting tool rolled into one.

Journalists Marketing Themselves

As journalism and entertainment continue to merge, and reporters increasingly become media personalities, image conscious journalists are gaining awareness of Twitter’s power as a branding and marketing tool. This is paramount in the mind of the ABC’s Leigh Sales who has developed an Australian Twittersphere cult-following with a unique blend of news and wit. She says the jury is still out on the real value of Twitter to her.

“It’s hard to see the application for me, given that I only have 1,000 or so followers, yet my program rates around 300k.” But she pointed to the potential value of such a following in marketing her books.

@leighsales ABC Lateline host

However, journalists are also beginning to see the value in using Twitter to interact with their audiences, recognizing the inevitable breakdown of old media strictures that separated news producers and receivers and reinforced a top-down approach to media consumption.

“Like other broadcasters and newspapers, we use Twitter to alert others to new stories and to invite feedback — but we don’t believe it should stop there,” observed Sky News) Australia deputy director of digital news John Bergin). “Our strategy doesn’t think of the viewer ‘out there’ spatially and conceptually. One of the most interesting things about Twitter is that there is no strictly defined audience. Every participant has the same tools to articulate his or her point, to frame an issue, to set an agenda. The space between news producer and news consumer has collapsed. We try to use Twitter as a means of inviting them into the newsroom, asking them what they think, what questions they would like us to ask our guests, and so forth.”

Subverting PR and Getting Jobs

Some journalists also reported using Twitter as a means of subverting the increasingly dominant modern PR machine. They said it allowed them to quickly go beyond press releases and official sources, like lobby groups and politicians, by interacting with followers who provided alternative perspectives, useful background and sometimes crucial facts in a story.

Finally, the journalists I interviewed mentioned the role of Twitter as a sort of media job agency. The Sydney Star Observer’s Harley Dennett highlighted the value of networking with senior journalists and editors at major Australian publications on Twitter.

“I comment on news of the day hoping potential future employers will notice how witty and informed I am,” he said.

This strategy worked for one U.S. college graduate. After initially failing to make an impression via email, Ashley Reynolds direct-messaged via Twitter the News Director at WYMT TV (http://www.wkyt.com/wymtnews) in Hazard, Kentucky. It worked. He replied via Twitter, set up an interview and she’s about to start work as a reporter on his news team.

“As far as I know, I’m the only one who contacted him through Twitter, so I really stood out,” she said. “With direct message you have to sell yourself in 140 characters. So in order to sell myself I had to be short, sharp, and simple.”

Breaking news in Twitter

Harley Dennett responds to an interview request via Twitter

In addition to using Twitter to monitor breaking news — like a mini wire service with public participation — and for the dissemination of breaking news, the ABC has also assigned reporters to live-tweet events, such as the Queensland state election this March.

Other reporters interviewed pointed to the value of Twitter search — a function which allows users to search on specific terms or phrases which are often grouped by relevant hashtags — to easily monitor community reporting of major breaking news. They also pointed to recent moves by public officials to release news via Twitter ahead of issuing press releases or staging media conferences. This means Twitter is being used not only as a place to cover and monitor breaking news, but also a place for sources to break news.

But the public is less likely to trust news broken on Twitter than that which is delivered via traditional news outlets according to Harley Dennett, who says audiences still attach credibility to detail as he discovered when he broke a story on Twitter recently about the closure of the Federal Magistrate’s Court in Sydney.

“Sometimes people don’t believe me when I reveal something on Twitter before the full story, with supporting quotes and documentation, comes out in print or online,” he said. “It’s hard to prove something in 140 characters when there’s nothing to link.”

Journalists would be wise to exercise similar caution, as two stories from Sydney this past fortnight demonstrate. In the first instance, a journalist writing for the online publication Crikey attacked Sydney Morning Herald technology reporter, Asher Moses (who did not respond to a request for an interview) for inappropriate tweeting. Crikey was later forced to apologize when it was revealed that some of the offending tweets actually came from a fake Twitter account.

In the second incident, it was revealed that a marketing company had been tweeting under the guise of the NSW Police Service about policies and crime in a social media experiment inspired by Barack Obama’s use of Twitter in his 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. The @nswpolice Twitter account had attracted 2,000 followers and forced a disgruntled police media unit to tweet under another handle before Twitter shut down the imposter site.

In the next installment of this two part series on journalists’ engagement with Twitter, I’ll look at the implications of the clash between the personal and the public in the Twittersphere along with the regulation of reporters’ tweeting by their employers and the ways in which Twitter is altering traditional practice. I’ll also provide a list of tips for journalists starting out on Twitter, crowdsourced from those already active in the space.

Julie Posetti is an award winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She’s been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Her academic research centers on talk radio, public broadcasting, political reporting and broadcast coverage of Muslims post-9/11. She blogs at J-Scribe and you can follow her on Twitter

by Robin Wauters on February 10, 2009

Companies using Twitter for commercial purposes may soon start getting charged for that activity, according to an interview British trade magazine Marketing (part of BrandRepublic) held with co-founder Biz Stone.

This is what Stone reportedly said:

“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”

No big surprises there, as this is often cited as one of the most obvious moves Twitter could make to start generating revenue, although many are expecting more from the startup who has become notorious for its lack of an apparent business model even after nearly 3 years of existence. Stone also said they will not start charging individual users, and that the move could “create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool.”

Stone did not give any details regarding pricing or the specific way Twitter would go about charging users and for what exactly. As a reminder: the startup has raised $20 million in venture capital to date and recently turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook.

One of the most recent examples of companies using Twitter for commercial purposes is Dell, who reportedly made $1 million in sales during the holidays via the micro-sharing utility, and recently started giving discounts exclusively to its followers.

We’ll see more of this type of behavior in the future beyond any shred of doubt, but I’m wondering what exactly is considered as ‘commercial usage’ by Twitter management: does it mean any way of promoting a product or service or only when there’s sales activity connected to the corporate accounts? And will companies be prepared to pay up for use of the service at all?

Marketing got in touch with Bob Pearson, VP of communities and conversations at Dell, with that exact question and got a telling response: “If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.”

Update: as Peter Kafka points out in comments, there was good article two days ago in New York Magazine which reveals a little more of where Twitter is headed.

By David Chartier | Published: December 30, 2008 – 11:40AM CT

Ubiquitous microblogging service Twitter is once again making political news today with the announcement that the Consulate General of Israel in New York will hold a “Citizen’s Press Conference” today. David Saranga, Consul of Media and Public Affairs, will be taking questions about the situation in Israel and Gaza via Twitter, and anything that requires more than Twitter’s 140 SMS-friendly characters will be posted to the Israel Consulate’s blog.The conference is set to run from 1-3pm EST, but the consulate’s Twitter account, twitter.com/IsraelConsulate, is already active and responding to questions.

If you aren’t familiar with how this “tweet and reply” system works, here’s a quick primer: On Twitter, users can direct public “tweets” (basic Twitter posts that are 140 characters or less) to other users by prefixing the message with an @ symbol and a username.

For example, if you want to ask the Israel Consulate a question for today’s conference, either log in or sign up and type a message like “@IsraelConsulate Can bombs really root out Hamas?” This will allow the people running the Consulate’s account to see your question and, ideally, reply back to you with a public message that (barring any custom preferences) all other users can see.

A screenshot of the Israel Consulate’s Twitter page with tweets and replies. Click for a larger view

Twitter can be used with a desktop browser, mobile applications, or even via SMS, allowing virtually anyone with some kind of an Internet-connect device to participate and as questions at this “Citizen Press Conference.”

A few drawbacks to this approach, however, could cause trouble for the Israel Consulate and Twitter’s participants. Opening the doors this wide to a global audience could very well overwhelm the Consulate’s team with question, many of which will undoubtedly be duplicates. Twitter’s focus on absolute simplicity may also make some Q&A conversations difficult to follow, as one of the most useful tools that could visualize threaded conversations, Quotably, has closed up shop; Twitter offers no comparable alternative.

Plus, Twitter offers a preference to only display replies to users that you follow, which will effectively hide any replies that @IsraelConsulate sends to most participants. Depending on the Twitter circle that you choose to follow, disabling this preference could result in a flood of @replies that drown out the Consulate’s conference.

Still, the adoption of Twitter for larger social and political exchanges will only be a boon for the service, even if this latest experiment encounters some turbulence. Other, more ambitious experiments, such as the dual-party presidential debate conducted over Twitter, may have had more trouble, but we have seen everything from C-SPAN, CNN, Shaquille O’Neill, school classrooms, Comcast, JetBlue, and even law enforcement agencies adopt the service to communicate in more personal, professional, and accessible ways with audiences.

California is yet to pass Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget, intended to help correct the huge deficit the state is expected to face over the next year and a half. The Governator has apparently had enough, and is turning to social media to urge constituents of the nation’s most populus state to pressure their lawmakers in the state legislature.

The “Legislature’s Failure to Act” widget features how many days the state has gone without having a budget passed, and also keeps a running ticker estimate of how much money the state is losing, modeled after the famous National Debt clock in New York that recently ran out of digits. The widget, powered by Clearspring, can be emedded on user’s websites and blogs, or posted directly to social networking profiles by clicking the “share” button:

Additionally, in case you hadn’t noticed yet, Schwarzenneger has taken to Twitter in recent months, posting links to updates about the budget crisis and promoting things like the widget. So far, his team is using the microblogging tool completely as a one-way broadcasting tool (the Governator isn’t following anyone and he has made no replies), but it’s a useful stream of information if you’re concerned about the issue.

Schwarzenneger, the former movie star, fittingly has his own channel on YouTube as well.

By Brian Solis

As online conversations continue to gain in prominence and relevance to any customer and market-focused business, it becomes critically important for marketing and service professionals to listen. It’s the listening that serves as the foundation for identifying, guiding, and establishing meaningful engagement.

Twitter is one of the more active and influential communities that can effectively recruit affiliates, incite action, and spark trends. Until now, the only way to measure conversations or keywords by authority in Twitter was either manually or through Technorati – assuming that the majority of people discussing any given topic had already claimed their Twitter. I suspect most haven’t done this nor realize that this is even an option with associated benefits in doing so.

Enter Twitority.

Twitority is a new service that that facilitates the search and sorting of keywords in Twitter by authority, or in less controversial terms, popularity. At the moment, authority is measured by followers, but perhaps, Twitority will eventually create an algorithm similar to Twinfluence in order to more accurately measure influence.

In the marketing and service worlds however, popularity is still relevant. As is, Twitority is a simple, yet helpful service that will help brand managers, community managers, and communications and customer service professionals tier research and response strategies and programs. It’s also helpful to identify and measure potential opportunities and new trends based on the weighted discussions surrounding relevant topics.

For more on services available for Twitter, please read, “Twitter Tools for Communications and Community Professionals.”

If you are the kind of person who can’t help but look when you drive by an accident scene, DMFail is for you. The site, which has been all the rage on Twitter for the last few days, shows direct (private) messages that were sent improperly on Twitter and are therefore public.

If you want to send another Twitter user a message that only she or he sees, you type [D + username + message]. But a lot of people accidentally type DM (for Direct Message) instead of D, and when that happens you pay the price of having your message pop into your Twitter stream for everyone to see.

DMFail grabs all those messages and reprints them on its site for everyone to see, which can be quite a horrible experience for the people involved. Thus the accident scene analogy.

It would be fairly trivial for Twitter to change things so that DM also sends a private message, but so far they haven’t. On average, a couple of messages per hour over all of Twitter end up hitting DMFail.

Direct messages on Twitter don’t seem to be all that secure in general. They’re available to third parties through the API, for example, and there has been at least one case where confusion led to making some direct messages public.

Anyhow, from now on I’m just going to start all my Twitter messages with DM. I suggest you do the same.