I have just read Brand Republic’s News Letter (13 August) entitled;
“Twitter mostly ‘pointless babble’ says study” http://tinyurl.com/qytkgy
Who would have thought it? What a surprise, I was gob smacked to find out this vital piece of research news from such a respected publication.
And someone paid people to do a ‘study’? I want a job like that.
Honestly, anyone who is on Twitter and contributes could have told them this for FREE …IT’S A SOCIAL NETWORK!, people can say what they like when they like and funnily enough, they do.
The objective of the ‘study’ was to answer some questions:
“particularly, should marketers try to “figure out” how to converse with potential customers, or is Twitter meant to be a place to share comments and photos with friends, rather than a place to promote brands.”
My vote is with the friends and photos. But of course brands and businesses will want to be on Twitter but they should be listening first before planning what they tweet and who they tweet to, as in groups, targeted individuals. Relevancy to their products or services should be top of the list.
News tweets are quoted as comprising of only 3% of the study. If you want news, go to a news site like the BBC or CNN, don’t look for it on Twitter. Even tweets from journalists aren’t always cutting edge news. (“Missed the flight to Iraq”) …bet you he was relieved.
My other question on this study is: “How many people did the study follow?” There are millions of people tweeting every minute surely the Pear Analytics research can’t be seen as globally significant especially as the study was over a two week period and I am informed was focused on 2000 people in the UK.
I read this great quote some time ago about research: “Statistics are a bit like a drunk leaning against a lamp post; it’s more about support than about illumination.” And in this case the statisticians must have been pissed out of their brains.
I fell about when I read the article and I’m still finding it hard to believe it was deemed newsworthy enough to publish. But it certainly gave me something to blog about, and I’ll tweet it just for good measure!
Marketers trying to ‘figure out’ Social networks like Twitter is a bit like men trying to figure out women; just when you think you you’ve got it, everything changes.
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