Here at Plum Voice we use Twitter to get and stay in touch with parties interested in interactive voice response (IVR), developments within the IVR industry and developments in the tech world in general. We maintain Twitter feeds for our three brands: Plum Voice (@PlumVoice), QuickFuse (@QuickFuseApps), and Floodlight (@floodlighttech) and followers have access to an array of industry-related tweets and tidbits.
Many businesses utilize Twitter in the same manner, sharing industry-related news and connecting with followers and potential customers. But how about all the other people out there? According to recently released statistics, Twitter has around 300 million users who generate over 300 million tweets per day.
This is a pretty impressive figure, considering that the website only became operational in March of 2006. The social network has rapidly expanded its user base and has experienced exponential growth in the years since its initial introduction.
Twitter continues to follow the same model, with users having the ability to send their messages in 140-character or less increments. According to Wikipedia, the initial 140 character limit was established in an attempt to insure compatibility with SMS messaging. For users looking to post links to external websites that have text over 140 characters, there are URL-shortening sites available that allow them to do this without exceeding character limits.
An analytics firm conducted a study in which they analyzed over 2,000 tweets and separated them into six distinct categories: pointless babble (40%), conversational (38%), pass-along value (9%), self-promotion (6%), spam (4%), news (4%). Most tweets fall along these lines, with subtle percentage variations.
By utilizing hashtags on Twitter, users can group together tweets that all refer to the same subject (ex. #coffee, #Christmas, #yellowducks).
Just today, Twitter released a report detailing the most popular hashtags of 2011, and they offer interesting insight in to the year that was. So what were the top hashtags? Among them #egypt, #japan, and #superbowl.
In terms of world news, the hot Twitter topics included Mubarak’s resignation, the raid on Osama bin Laden, the Japanese earthquake and Fukushima, Gabrielle Giffords, Gaddafi’s death and swine flue outbreak.
As for the tech topics, popular terms included Mac App Store, Mozilla Firefox, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Nintendo 3DS and Guitar Hero.
A quick scan of these topics offers researchers interesting incite into the popular products, places and people for 2011, and can potentially offer accurate predictions for the upcoming year as well.
Will everyone be as interested In the McLobster, Wayne Rooney or Jim Harbaugh? Probably not, but the year ahead promises to produce new topics that users can analyze and discuss on their Twitter feeds to their heart’s content.
