Posts tagged Twitter
Study Suggests Content Matters On Twitter
Feb 10th
Will this article get re-tweeted? According to a new HP Labs white paper, we can now predict whether or not it will become popular on Twitter.
The findings are crucial because most previous analysis of how tweets travel have focused on who has been tweeting as opposed to what they have been tweeted. If someone influential on Twitter tweets something, the conventional thinking goes, it will spread. That thinking still plays a big factor, but the new research highlights that content matters.
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Researchers analyzed 40,000 articles posted to Twitter over the course of a week in August and collected information on the agency that wrote each article, the outlet that first tweeted the article, the article’s information category and the emotion of the article’s language. What they found is some articles are more tweetable than others.
Among the key findings predicting the likelihood an article will be tweeted and retweeted:
- Sourcing was the biggest indicator. The more reliable the source, the better chances of a tweet.
- Stories in popular categories will spread more rapidly (as Megan Garber at The Atlantic notes, “Health! technology! cats!”).
- Mention a known person, place or organization and you’re also more likely to get your story tweeted (which explains why celebrities’ names often litter the trending topics column whenever I log into Twitter).
What does not, however, seem to influence an articles tweetability is emotion. Emotional articles were no more likely to be spread than objective articles, the researchers said. “Brand matters; information matters; tone, however, doesn’t seem to make much of a difference when it comes to sharing,” Garber wrote in her thorough analysis of the study.
The researchers classified articles “low-tweet,” “medium-tweet,” or “high-tweet.” They said their model is 84% accurate.
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Saudi Twitter User Faces Death Penalty for Tweets
Feb 9th
A 23-year-old Saudi Twitter user, Hamza Kashgari, fled the country Sunday to avoid being arrested for his religious tweets, only to find himself in the hands of the Malaysian police today. He was heading to New Zealand to request political asylum.
On Saturday, the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, Kashgari tweeted three times, expressing his religious beliefs about the founder of Islam. Within hours, he was inundated with violent threats. Despite a full renunciation, a warrant was issued by Kingdom authorities for his arrest and the Kingdom’s religious Fatwa Council condemned him as an apostate and an infidel, crimes which are punishable by death.
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“Blasphemous” Tweets
According to one of Kashgari’s friends, who wishes to remain anonymous, these are the three tweets which were the basis for the Saudi arrest warrant.
- On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.
- On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.
- On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.
Kashgari’s Twitter account, @Hmzmz, has been shut down.
Kashgari’s friend points out that these actions have come after a number of reversals for religious conservatives in the Wahhabi-influenced state. These include a law allowing women to work as salespeople in public lingerie stores, the replacement of the head of the religious police with a moderate, who ordered restrictions on how the religious police operate. It also happened within the context of the unrest of the Arab Spring.
Hashtags of Shame
Kashgari’s harassment is not out of the blue, nor, apparently, based on these tweets alone. He has been the target of religious twitter users for months. “Public shaming through hashtags is now a common Saudi pressure tactic, especially against public officials and government scandals,” said his friend.
A hardcore Saudi cleric used YouTube to post his condemnation of the young man. The cleric, Nasser al-Omar, known as the “weeping cleric” for his tendency to burst into tears at the blasphemy done to the Prophet, called for Kashgari to be hauled before a Sharia court, according to long-time Saudi blogger, Ahmad al-Omran (Saudi Jeans).
“These people [like Kashgari] should be put to trial in Sharia courts. It is known that cursing God and his Prophet is apostasy. And the fact that he has repented with cold words will not probably save him in the court.”
Al-Omram’s translation
The punishment for apostasy is death.
Saudi Arabia’s information minister, has commanded that no one publish any of Kashgari’s writings. Prior to this incident, he was a columnist with al-Bilad, a newspaper based in the eastern city of Jeddah.
“I have instructed all newspapers and magazines in the Kingdom not to allow him to write any thing and we will take legal measures against him.”
Kashgari was trying to make a connecting flight to New Zealand when he was apprehended and arrested yesterday in Malaysia at the Kuala Lumpur airport. It has been reported that Malaysia, an officially Islamic state, will forcibly repatriate Kashgar to Saudi Arabia.
Building photos courtesy of Shutterstock
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Q&A: Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley on What He’s Learning From Twitter and What’s Next
Feb 8th
Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing.
To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that’s more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful “Explore” tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.
As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that’s useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.
I recently sat down with Crowley at the company’s brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what’s next. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our chat.
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ReadWriteWeb: Where is Foursquare right now?
Dennis Crowley: I think we’re starting to get to the point where people are starting to see where the product is going and where the vision is going. The most exciting stuff for me to watch is all these people who have been Foursquare users for a year or so, writing their own blog posts and tweeting their own stuff about “oh, now I get it.”
After we launched Explore on the Web, they’re like, “This isn’t about points and badges anymore. This is about using the data that Foursquare’s getting from check-ins in order to do all this interesting stuff about surfacing things that are nearby, things that I might like, places I should go, experiences that I should have.” That’s been our goal all along.
One of the big tasks that we have this year is getting people to think of the product more as something that’s all about discovery and introducing them to new places, and making their experience in new cities and unfamiliar neighborhoods easier for them. As opposed to just checking in to unlock points and badges. I think we’re still stuck with a little bit of that stereotype, and this year’s about us getting out of that.
Foursquare’s new Web-based “Explore” feature.
How do you get past that stereotype and grow?
The challenge isn’t really that dissimilar than some of the growing pains and hazing that Twitter went through. For a long time, Twitter was “oh, it’s just people tweeting what they had for lunch, or that they’re going to the movies.” That wasn’t interesting for a lot of people.
Then they hit a moment that was a little bit of critical mass and a little bit of clarity, where people started using it to break news and share headlines and spread information. And that’s when it started clicking for a lot of people. For me, I was always interested in it, but when the plane landed in the Hudson and that’s how you were learning stuff faster than CNN was breaking it, or when Michael Jackson died, those were the big moments that I think solidified Twitter’s importance for a lot of people.
For us, we’re starting to get to that point where people see that we’re more than just a standard check-in app. You can go into Foursquare any time of the day and it will recommend interesting things that are nearby. So it’s not analogous – it’s not exactly the same as the Twitter experience. But we have that problem of perception that we’re still working to overcome.
I look at what those guys went through, and if you just keep pushing at the vision long enough, it will eventually turn itself around or make itself clear to people. That’s why, looking at those blog posts, it’s really rewarding for me, because I can see that the change is already happening already.
What will you change?
There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done in the app. We’re in the process of going through a redesign in the app, in a sense. We’re basically taking all the stuff we built over the last two years or so, disassembling it… You put all the pieces on the table, and figure out, “Okay, what is the best way to put these pieces back together so that it tells the story of Foursquare in the way that we want it to be told?” And I think if we can do that properly, then that’s our ticket to really being able to effectively communicate how powerful the data is and how powerful a lot of the tools are.
A peek at Foursquare’s brand-new, sunny headquarters in New York
What about making money? Will we start to see more advertising-based content in streams?
It’s a project for the near term. That’s a lot of what the Amex stuff is. (Foursquare has a broad partnership with American Express.) It’s experimenting with merchants to figure out a way that we can put products that are monetizable into the Foursquare product, in a way that you don’t look at it and say, “I can’t believe Foursquare put advertising in the stream.” You say, “this is great, there’s a $10 discount here.”
Since 2009, we’ve been pushing different ways to get merchants involved in the conversation with users. If users are looking for places to go, put merchants in there to help entice them. We did it initially with mayor specials, we’re starting to do it now with the Amex stuff, and we’ll be continuing to push that.
Our belief has always been, in order to connect people to places, and places to people, there’s a way to insert a dialogue with a merchant that in a way doesn’t feel like advertising, because the users are getting some tangible benefit out of it. It can be just special treatment, like you get to cut the line. It could be that you save a couple bucks. It could be that when you bring your friends, you get something special. There’s a whole wide variety of it. It’s just rewarding the user for things that they’d be doing anyway with Foursquare.
This is a bit out-there, but Netflix has built up a huge advantage for its streaming movie service by getting it installed everywhere, from new TVs to videogame systems. Can you use that concept for Foursquare, in a car perhaps?
Yeah, why not? I think anywhere where you see maps. Any map should have Foursquare dots on them. The dots could be representative of a number of things. It could be where your friends are right now. Or once you put your car in park, these are the five things you should be doing in this neighborhood.
And you could see a world where it’s like, here’s five things that I’m looking at, and I instantly send them to my phone, and then as I’m walking around, Radar (a serendipity-manufacturing Foursquare feature) buzzes me to let me know about them. When you think of all the other places that you’d probably encounter maps, being able to put Foursquare dots on them is a really interesting thing for us.
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Poll: People Don’t Rely On Facebook, YouTube, Twitter For Election Information
Feb 7th
Fewer people are relying on the Internet in general and social media specifically for election news and information than some social media “experts” would have us believe, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.
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While many in tech journalism circles have been quick to call the 2012 presidential race “the Social Media Election,” the poll found that few of us are relying on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for election information. While 25% say they regularly learn something about the election from the Internet, tha’s almost unchanged from 2008, when 24% said they regularly got election information from the Internet.
Even more telling is where on the Internet that information comes from: 6% of poll respondents said they are regularly learning about the campaign from Facebook, followed by YouTube videos (3%) and Twitter (2%), according to Pew.
One reason social media hasn’t grown by the leaps and bounds predicted is less engagement by young people. In 2008, there were two contested primaries, including a Democratic primary which has traditional drawn younger and arguably more tech-savvy voters. This year, only one in five people under 30 say they have been following the campaigns “very closely,” down from 31% in 2008.
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Twitter is Impossible to Resist: Study Indicates Social Media Urges Stronger than Sex
Feb 6th
A new study just released by the Chicago University’s Booth Business School suggests that people find it more difficult to resist the urge to use Twitter or Facebook than to resist sex, sleep, cigarettes or alcohol. The study, which examined 205 German men and women between the ages of 18 and 85, concluded that social [...]
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[STUDY] Jonesing For A Retweet: Twitter Harder To Resist Than Cigarettes And Booze
Feb 4th
Sleep, sex and…Twitter?
A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University’s Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years.
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“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann told the Guardian.
The study was primarily focused on willpower as opposed to addiction, and the moments when people were forced to resist urges to partake in an activity or deal with conflicting urges, such as the urge to sleep and the urge to stay out socializing. Sleep and sex generally trumped other urges, but checking media and work were generally put ahead of socializing and shopping urges.
“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” Hofmann said.
The study found that resistance to all urges declined as the day wore on, and that people seem to do a better job of resisting the urge to smoke or drink than many may have thought, given the addictive nature of both.
“With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one,” Hofmann said. “So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”
Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.
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Is Twitter Ready For Some Football?
Feb 3rd
Sunday’s Super Bowl is full of betting possibilities, but one line we couldn’t find in Vegas is whether or not Twitter will crash because of heavy traffic during the game.
This year’s NFL playoffs have already set one record for the most tweeted sports moment in history, when a Tim Tebow pass stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers on the first play of overtime against the Denver Broncos. The 9,420 tweets per second were not enough to cripple Twitter, but on New Year’s Eve in Japan 16,197 per second brought the service down. There is speculation that this year’s Super Bowl will set new records for both Facebook and Twitter.
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We’ve asked Twitter if they’ve made an contingencies for Sunday’s game and will update as soon as we hear back from them. Such an incident doesn’t just affect users, but also loads of sports apps that let users track chatter about the game using Twitter’s API.
Most recent Twitter crashes have occurred as a result of a clearly-defined moment: midnight on New Year’s in a part of the world where Twitter is more popular than Facebook was a good candidate. For Twitter to crash on Sunday, we suspect there would have to be a key, game-shattering play like the Tebow pass. With even more people tuning into the game it would most certainly shatter that record, although it’s unclear whether it would be enough to bring the site down.
Super Bowl commercials aren’t likely to produce a Twitter-crashing moment, either, as most of the commercials have already been leaked online. So many surprises have already been given away already that today marked the first time since 1988 that USA Today did not publish a list of Super Bowl advertisers on the Friday before the game.
Predictions
- A close game will produce a moment that makes it into the Top 10 list of most tweeted events: most likely it’s a game-ending play or a referee’s announcement after video review of a disputed call.
- That moment makes the Top 10 but does not cause Twitter to crash.
- That moment doesn’t come close to breaking the all-time tweets-per-second record of 25,088 set in December when a popular anime film was shown on Japanese television.
- And not that it has anything to do with tech or Twitter, or anything other than geographic bias, but the Patriots win a fourth Super Bowl with a 31-21 win.
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Twitter Analytical Tools Threaten Third-Party Developers
Feb 2nd
Twitter may become the heavyweight in analytics of its own content, boxing out rivals HootSuite, bit.ly and Klout.
As first reported by ReadWriteWeb, Twitter plans to launch sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter’s manager for news and journalism.
Anderson, who made the comments last weekend at a social media conference at Columbia University in New York, said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. Twitter already offers similar services to its advertisers.
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The British public relations agency Punch said that the obvious advantage Twitter has in analytics of its own API stream will probably be too much for marketers looking to understand their social media campaigns to pass up.
“Whilst there are numerous analytics tools available which can look into Twitter in depth, having an analytics platform embedded within the network itself is likely to improve the quality of future campaigns as a whole,” Pete Goold, managing director of Punch said in a statement. “This development may also be part of Twitter’s strategy to try and persuade more brands to invest in the platform from a marketing perspective, since the pool of information and insights which could be available through Twitter is astronomical.”
Twitter’s open API has been widely praised and has allowed companies like HootSuite to develop platforms that not only help users manage Twitter campaigns, but analyze the impact and reach of individual tweets. Recently, however, Twitter has made moves to compete with the third party providers.
In addition to the anticipated analytical tools, Twitter acquired and then redesigned TweetDeck, a popular HootSuite competitor. The redesign mimicked many of HootSuite’s more popular features, including a browser based platform.
Of course, seeing is believing: Twitter has been promising analytics tools for at least two years, with an executive once saying they would be available by the end of 2010.
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Why the Twitter ‘Who Gives a Tweet’ Researchers are Wrong
Feb 2nd
A recent study by Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Georgia Tech researchers found that 25 percent of tweets aren’t even worth reading, according to participants. They believe better filters will help. Actually, they have it all backwards.
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How Not to Advertise on Twitter
Feb 1st
Twitter’s sponsored tweets and sponsored hashtags are cropping up more often as the social network places a heavy focus on advertising. As with any new advertising offering, we’ll learn how to use it effectively by watching the efforts of others. Advertising on a social network offers up opportunities for engagement that can’t be found elsewhere, but that opportunity comes with significant risk.
Sponsored hashtags can blow up in your face, they can be stolen by a competitor and they can be surrounded by risky UGC. But they can also very quickly achieve some great attention for your brand. Choosing to advertise on Twitter is a risky move, ripe with opportunity and danger. It shouldn’t be undertaken lightly or without serious thought.
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Walgreens Can’t Buy Love
Walgreens recently purchased some love on Twitter, literally. In choosing the self-serving hashtag, #ILoveWalgreens, the company made a grievous error. They assumed love that wasn’t there.
People enjoy going out to eat, so they might love a favorite restaurant. Many enjoy shopping for clothes, so they might admit to loving a favorite designer or even a boutique store. People might even love their doctor or hairdresser, but very few people love fast food restaurants, grocery stores, plumbers or pharmacies. In these cases, you can’t buy love, but you can buy attention, and the two are different beasts.
The social media spend, designed to combat a very specific issue, was inappropriately broad and presumptive. A better case would have been to focus on the problem, that Walgreens could no longer accept Express Scripts, and choose a tag that supported their efforts there, like #freedominhealthcare or #yourscriptchoice and gave voice to a public who feels unheard and unloved when it comes to healthcare decisions.
Hulu’s Arrested Hashtag
Hulu is sponsoring a hashtag to promote their Superbowl commercial with Will Arnett. The hashtag, #mushymush, is in reference to their ongoing theme of alien world domination through excessive media intake.
While their hashtag is on point, it’s not a hashtag that is particularly interesting to their average fan. Hulu could have been more daring, and ended up with real traction had they chosen a hashtag that would really resonate with their viewers.
Because they chose an Arrested Development star, and dropped several references into the ad, they could have created buzz by pointing that out or even asking Arrested Development fans to count the number of references in the video. This, of course, would mean a heavy focus on the show and that may not be in the best interest of a big Superbowl spend. But there are many ways they could have jazzed this up, and stayed show-neutral. Hulu is staffed by a variety of cool and fun folks, as evidenced by the campaign itself. Creativity is important and #mushymush can’t have been the most interesting thing that came out of their advertising department.
They also did a poor job of communicating what they wanted. While they did get some high profile retweets, from Roku and Yahoo_Screen, many of the other dozen tweets are either done by Hulu themselves or by Hulu employees. If they asked their employees to share the video, which isn’t a bad thing at all, they should have also suggested sample copy. Their star even tweeted about it without using the hashtag, as did most of the folks who watched the video and shared it. There’s no call to action on their viral mechanism, the video. Why not end the video with the hashtag? I’m laughing, give me some instructions as to what I should do to share the funny with my friends.
Subway Offers Up a Footlong Hashtag
Photo credit Luca Falda
Unlike Hulu, who couldn’t get any attention on Twitter for their hashtag, Subway has gotten attention, but the wrong kind. Their main problem wasn’t in their choice of hashtag, it was that they didn’t gauge sentiment before they advertised on the social network.
From people angry that a $5 foot long really wasn’t $5, to employees who resent having to work at Subway, the hashtag is a busy one, rife with anger. To be fair to Subway, however, there is a solid amount of positive sentiment in their resulting tweets too.
They could decrease some of the negativity if they let Subway employees know that they are about to release a trending hashtag and ask for their support. They should also react in some way to the negatives, using Twitter. I would suggest reaching out to all of the negatives and thanking them for their feedback. Who knows, there could be some positive engagement with the brand to come from it, rather than just pulling the hashtag when the going gets tough.
The Takeaway
What we can learn here is that there is no easy ad spend. Whether you’re slapping a vinyl cling on your car to promote your housecleaning business or coordinating a multi-million dollar ad campaign for an international beverage maker, the details matter. Creativity grabs your attention, but it’s the practical details that ensure the brand is remembered and the call to action is acted upon.
Advertising on a social network is not different in this regard, but there are parts of this ad spend that are unique to the medium. Prepare your employees with detailed instructions that recommend appropriate behavior. Choose to align with existing sentiment, and don’t make it all about you. Do some preliminary insights gathering, and be prepared to shelve the entire thing if the risk outweighs the benefits.
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