Posts tagged Twitter
Study: Twitter Users Believed Bin Laden Was Dead Before Mainstream Media Confirmation
Apr 27th
Last year’s biggest news story – the death of Osama bin Laden – is now a key to understanding just how deeply Twitter has affected the news universe. The Georgia Institute of Technology will release a study today about coverage of bin Laden’s killing that may be the most comprehensive yet in showing how news spreads on Twitter.
Researchers at Georgia Tech worked with researchers at Microsoft Research Asia and University of California-Davis to analyze more than 600,000 tweets sent in a two-hour period, stretching from minutes before the first rumor of Osama bin Laden’s death to tweets surrounding confirmation of his killing by U.S. forces. Among the key findings: The majority of people reading the early tweets believed they were true, even before they were confirmed by mainstream media, and celebrities played a key role in disseminating the news.
That second part may have lasting effects beyond simply analyzing the news: Two of the lead researchers are now working on software that could help analyze the mood of celebrities on social media to help marketing companies unveil products and find celebrity endorsers.
“Rumors spreading on Twitter is one thing,” said Mengdie Hu, a Ph.D. candidate in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, who led the study. “Determining if they are true is another, especially in this era of social media and the rush to break news.”
Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn), an aide to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is credited in the study with confirming reports of bin Laden’s death at 10:24 p.m. on May 1 of last year. By that point, 50% of the tweets discussing the news had been written as fact or in “very confident” terms. CBS producer Jill Jackson (@jacksonjk) tweeted her own confirmation eight minutes after Urbahn. The news began to spread rapidly after New York Times reporter Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) retweeted both reports.
By the time network news broke into programming 21 minutes after Urbahn’s initial tweet, 80% of tweets discussing bin Laden’s death had been written as fact or in certain terms, according to the study.
“We believe Twitter was so quick to trust the rumors because of who sent the first few tweets,” Hu said. “They came from reputable sources. It’s unlikely that a CBS News producer or a New York Times reporter would spread rumors of something so important and risk jeopardizing their reputation. Twitter saw their credentials and quickly believed the news was true.”
After the initial reports and confirmations, however, something interesting happened: Celebrities became the key connectors in spreading news about bin Laden’s death. Within a half-hour of the first television reports, a group of 100 “elite users,” including comedian Steve Martin and reality stars Kim Kardashian and Paul “DJ Pauly D” DelVecchio of MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” had surpassed the traditional media’s reach in spreading the news by Twitter.
“The celebrities weren’t the first people to arrive at the party,” said John Stasko, Hu’s advisor and professor in the School of Interactive Computing. “But they stayed the longest and brought the most guests.”
The first anniversary of bin Laden’s death is Tuesday, May 1.
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Tiny Prints Collaborates with BrightEdge to Prove the Impact of Twitter on … – MarketWatch (press release)
Apr 25th
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Tiny Prints Collaborates with BrightEdge to Prove the Impact of Twitter on …
MarketWatch (press release) SAN MATEO, Calif., April 25, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — BrightEdge, the global leader in enterprise SEO, today unveiled the results of its work with Tiny Prints to align posts on Twitter with search engine optimization (SEO) and improve online … |
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How To Prioritize The Long Tail With Twitter
Apr 24th
Lately, Twitter has been on my mind. Not only because I am speaking about it at SMX Toronto, but also because I have been trying to come up with new strategic ways to use it for clients in order to enhance their SEO efforts. For me, and I suspect for others as well, one of [...]
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Twitter Can’t Beat Facebook
Apr 23rd
Hardcore Twitter users, I know you’re a loyal bunch (in fact, I consider myself one of you). So don’t take this personally.
This article is about Facebook and how it is either going to destroy Twitter, force the microblogging service to change or make it an aquisition target by a rival, such as Apple or Google.
Or so says David Clarke, CEO of BGT Partners, an independent digital agency. Clarke says Facebook exposes key flaws with Twitter, including its 140-character limit on messages, as well as Twitter’s own trouble generating consistent revenue streams, which we previously reported on.
In Clarke’s world, the pure scale of Facebook and the limitations of Twitter make the beloved service “obsolete.”
“This character limit is wearing thin as consumers expect richer and more robust content that’s easy to access,” Clarke said. “Twitter existing by itself and generating enough revenue to become a substantial business model will be a struggle. It’s much more likely that ultimately Twitter will be taken over by Google, Apple or Facebook.”
This isn’t to say that Twitter isn’t likable: As Arianna Huffington has said, Facebook and Twitter and other social networks have created a new trend, where “self-expression has become the new entertainment.”
This is about Twitter not being profitable, a prospect that probably won’t change as long as it keeps getting lumped in the same sentence (and same realm of competition) as Facebook.
And, sure, Facebook is trying to mimic Twitter’s success with advertisement click-through rates, but brands are still struggling to monetize Twitter pages and most of the potential revenue-generating ideas are being seized by third-party companies.
Twitter made a few key fumbles along the way, including its well-intentioned move of opening up its API to third-party developers. The end result has been that those developers are making money off of doing everything, from developing apps for posting tweets that work better than Twitter’s own interface to analyzing data and tweets around big news events.
But perhaps Twitter’s biggest challenge is that it doesn’t encourage interaction the way Facebook and Pinterest do. If you look at the average Twitter user, according to a 2011 study by Duncan Watts, about half of the tweets they see are coming from one of 20,000 users.
What that means, Watts told Felix Salmon of Reuters, is “a lot of people do a lot more reading than writing, while a very small group of people are responsible for a huge proportion of what is read” on Twitter.
That’s not to say Twitter’s numbers aren’t impressive. Or, as Salmon noted, Twitter “has actually been astonishingly good at getting people to write anything at all.” When the service passed the 200 million user mark in June 2011, the company noted on its blog that “the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.”
“The biggest story out of Twitter right now is the lack of people with accounts who are actually active users,” Clark said. “Twitter has plenty of sign-ups, but a very small portion [comprises] engaged users.”
And that is the challenge for Twitter, or as Clarke predicts, whoever takes it over: Active users, in the still-developing economics of social media, are lucrative users. Twitter needs to find lucrative users, or all of us Twitter lovers are going to have to find a new microblogging service.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Wajam Adds Social Layer to Google With Facebook, Twitter Results
Apr 23rd
Social search company Wajam launched their next generation offering today, bringing personalized results from Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to regular Google search with a user interface that rivals Google’s own Search Plus Your World.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Twitter Helps Prove That Fame Isn’t Fleeting
Apr 22nd
Forget 15 minutes of fame. Google, eBay, and Berkeley University researches have concluded today’s stars don’t dim quite so quickly, thanks to sites like Twitter. They were unable to find any statistically significant decrease in fame duration.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Twitter Announces Patent Agreement Where Employees Control IP
Apr 17th
Today Twitter announced its new Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), which will give its engineers and designers control over the patents they create.
This is a dramatic break from the current approach in Silicon Valley, where companies take full control of patents and can then sell them or use them in lawsuits. “With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon,” Twitter wrote in its announcement.
The IPA will apply retroactively to patents created in the past. Twitter says it will implement the agreement later this year.
Twitter has had its share of patent litigation. In October of last year, patent lawyer Dinesh Agarwal claimed Twitter infringed on his patent for a “method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people.” A court rejected Twitter’s attempt to get the case dismissed, and it moved to trial. The judge pressured Twitter to settle with the patent holder but Twitter eventually won; a federal jury in Norfolk, Virginia, sided with the company.
Image via Shutterstock.
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I am SEO and so can you: tool helps tweak content for search, Twitter – Ars Technica
Apr 15th
 Business 2 Community |
I am SEO and so can you: tool helps tweak content for search, Twitter
Ars Technica In the never-ending battle for the top of the Google search results page, and for advertising click-throughs, marketers and bloggers enlist an ever-changing bag of tricks to game search engine algorithms, often with the help of SEO consultants and a … Creating a CRM Database for Your SEO Linkbuilding |
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Facebook Wants to Mimic Click-Through Success of Twitter Ads
Apr 12th
Users were more likely to click on a Twitter ad than a Facebook ad in the first quarter, according to a recent study. Yet Facebook will likely be valued at more than $100 billion following its initial public offering next month, while Twitter struggles to find a consistent revenue stream and remains several years away from an IPO of its own.
Why?
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Come Chat On Twitter With #MyBlogGuest!
Apr 11th
My Blog Guest has always been the excellent proof of the power of the community. Started from scratch, it has never had anything except the community to back it: our users promote it via videos, reviews, and sharing. All our features are user-invented (that’s why we’ve been forced to sacrifice on the usability a bit [...]
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