Site analysis of Twitter

1. E-Commerce
Assignment on Twiiter
By Bittu Singh & Shubham Singh – DFT V
NIFT, Gandhinagar
20-Nov-17

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Table of Contents
1. The Advent and Age of Social Media ................................................................................................ 3
2. Twitter............................................................................................................................................. 4
3. Twitter : Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 4
4. Twitter : Features ............................................................................................................................ 8
5. Twitter : Differentiating Factors ....................................................................................................... 8
5.1 Limited length................................................................................................................................ 9
5.2 Tweet style ....................................................................................................................................9
6. Possible objectives and course of actions for optimizing use of Twitter for Business ...................... 10
7. How to use Twitter in the best way possible for businesses?.......................................................... 11

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1. The Advent and Age of Social Media
With tremendous growth of social networks, there has been a growth in the amount of new
data that is being created every minute on these networking sites. Twitter acts as a great
source of rich information for millions of users on the internet and therefore is apt for applying
data mining. The notion of community in this social networking world has caught lots of
attention. Twitter is a popular micro-blogging service that allows people to share updates,
news, and information known as ‘‘tweets’’ with people in their Twitter network and beyond.
With millions of users, it is oneof the most popular social media sites.
The current phase on the internet is witnessing a tremendous growth of social networks and
huge amounts of new data are being created every second. With the advent of social networks,
it has also become possible to disseminate this information at very fast rates. Millions of new
user posts everyday arebeing created on social networking sites likeFacebook and Twitter.
Social Media has recently evolved into a source of social, political and real time information. In
addition to this it is also a great means of communication and marketing. People have been
sharing information on social networks through the use of status updates , blogging, sharing
multimedia content like images and videos as well as interacting together thereby forming
groups and communities on social networks. Monitoring and analysing this information can
lead to valuable insights that might otherwise be hard to get using conventional methods and
media sources. The social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide a new way to
share the information among them and get frequent updates. In addition to this, the sites also
allow sharing of additional information which can be important in analysing the contents, e.g.
location etc. The social media has an advantage over conventional media sources as it is
managed by the users. Conventional media only allowed users to gain information that was
provided to them. The flow of information was only one-sided from the media to user. With
social networks, however, the users now have the ability to respond to the news and events
around them and provide their opinion on them as well as share them. This leads to the
evolution of a multi-way mode of information dissemination in which the users post
information along with other information like links, images and videos. As a result, a user
generated model of information is generated. The social graph of users and their connections
on the social networks plays an important role in analysing this information model in order to
obtain meaningful data from the vast amount of “user generated content” that is created every
day. Since, the micro-blogging sites like Facebook and Twitter allow users to share short
messages and multimedia, they have become an instant source of information through which
users from all around the world can remain connected and get to know about the information
from several sources.

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2. Twitter
Twitter, as it is called “the SMS of the Internet” is an online news and social networking service
based in California, United States. It has more than 25 offices around the world. It was created
in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz stone and Evan Williams. It comes under Twitter
Inc., a public company. The CEO of the company is Jack Dorsey with Omed Kordestani as its
Executive Chairman. Its revenue is in the excess of USD2.5 billion and its net income is in excess
of USD 450 millions. It employs around 4,000 personnel. Vine and Periscope are its two
subsidiaries. The site’s biggest boon is that it is multilingual. The site handles more than 1.6
billion search queries per day. On the day of the US Presidential Election, Twitter proved to be
thelargest sourceof breaking news with morethan 40 million election related tweets.
3. Twitter : Introduction
Twitter was launched as a micro-blogging website in March 2006 which allows users to post status
updates of up to 140 characters, also known popularly as tweets. Since its launch, twitter has amassed a
large user base and now has over 300 millionusers. Twitter allowsits users to post short status
messages called tweets. Tweets can be posted (tweeted) from various sources which include the twitter
website,twitter mobile applications as well as several third party applications/websites(after
authentication). Users also have the control over the privacy features and they can choose to either
make their tweetspublic which make the tweets visible to any one or make them private which restricts
the access to only some users who obtain permissionfrom the user. Users can follow other users on
twitter which givesthem access to their tweets on their homepage on twitter.

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Popularity of Twitter
 Global rank -12
 Bounce rate of thesite= 54.3%
 Daily page views per visitor =3.26
 Averagedaily timespent on site= 6:13 minutes

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 Total number of sites linking to Twitter =55,71,981
 Loading time= 2.45 seconds; 69% sites arefaster

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4. Twitter : Features
 Type of content : Pointless babble, conversational, pass-along value, self promotion,
spam, news
 Format –Tweet, re-tweet, hashtag
 Trending topics – words or phrases which become popular as they are mentioned more
number of times
 Numerous tools for adding, following and monitoring content such as TweetDeck and
HootSuite
 Verified accounts – To formally validate the identity of the person or the company that
owns theaccount
 Mobile platforms – Apps for Android, Windows and iOS platforms. Users can also tweet
by sending SMS.
Twitter allows several other features too. It allows users to reply to tweets of other users by
clicking on the reply button on the tweet of the user who one wants to reply to. This is a way to
say something back in response to a user’s tweet. In addition to this, users can also mention
other users in their tweets by adding ‘@’ to the username of another user in a tweet. A
mention is a way to refer to some other user. Another popular concept of twitter is re-
tweeting. A re-tweet is an event of sharing someone else’s tweet to our followers. Re-tweet
plays an important part in the dissemination of information on twitter. Users can also add a
hashtag in their tweets by adding a ‘#’ sign before relevant keywords. This is used to categorize
those tweets to show more easily in twitter search. Very popular hash tags on twitter become
trending topics on twitter.
An important feature of twitter that separates it from other social networking sites like
Facebook is that the relationship of following and being followed are not necessarily two ways.
Following someone is equivalent to subscribing to a blog; the follower gets all the status
updates of theuser that hefollows.
5. Twitter : Differentiating Factors
An important characteristic that emerges from the network of twitter users is the Social Graph.
A social graph is a graph derived from the connections between the users. These connections
can be of many forms. Themost straightforward social graph that can be created from twitter is
a graph that contains following and being followed relationship among users. There have been
several researches focused towards studying these social graphs and finding some features

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from such graphs. There are a few properties common to many social graphs: the small-world
property, power law degree distributions and network transitivity (two users who have a
common neighbour are more likely to be connected together rather than with some other user
who with whom they don’t sharea neighbour).
The social graphs generally also contain a clustered structure meaning that certain users form a
tightly knit group with very low connectivity between different such groups. These clusters may
also contain other similarity features like similar tweets or locations etc. A community in a
social graph can be described as a group of vertices that have more edges between them than
any other vertex that belongs to other group in thesocial graph.
5.1 Limited length
One of the distinguishing technological affordances of micro-blogging is the limited length of
messages. Twitter is limited to 140 characters. Historical parallels suggest that technological
limitations are not new and can be a welcomed restriction for many chroniclers of life events.
As of now, Twitter is experimenting to doublethetweet length from 140 to 280 characters.
5.2 Tweet style
The style of a tweet was defined as its broad purpose or form. A single Tweet could have
multiple styles, but all tweets had at least one of the following styles: accounting, commentary,
content sharing, information seeking, and response. Tweets were coded as accounting if they
reported on or shared current or recent information and activities of the person in the tweet,
or convey changes in status. Tweets were coded as commentary if they expressed a reflection,
emotion, opinion, or evaluation. Tweets were coded as content sharing if they contained
content from other websites, authors, or sources. Tweets were coded as information seeking if
they sought out information, answers, opinions, or feedback about the tweet subject or topic.
Tweets were coded as response if they indicate a response to a prior conversation. This was
often indicated with the@usernameconvention, though not always.

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6. Possible objectives and course of actions for optimizing use of
Twitter for Business
Objective Evaluating criteria
Improve customer service Number of messages sent to your company
requiring customer service
Increase customer retention Number of tweets about your brand
Number of re-tweets about your brand
Develop thought leadership Number of positive tweets related to brand
impression
Number of clicks on links posted in tweets
Develop relationship with reporters and
bloggers
Number of tweets from reporters or bloggers
Number of clicks on company news related or
custom or custom developed media links
posted
Number of other online mentions of your
brand from reporters or bloggers following
you
Prospect for warm leads Number of people on Twitter contact your
company for product or serviceinformation
Number of site visitors from Twitter going to
your websitepages
Number of white-paper, podcast or video
downloads from Twitter driven traffic
Number of Sale Inquiry page views and
completed forms from Twitter-driven traffic
Monitor competition Number of times your competitor’s brand is a
mentioned in a tweet versus your own brand
Number of messages sent to your competitors
requiring customer service
Number of positive tweets your competitor
receives as a consequence of satisfied
customers
Search engine optimization Number of keyword enriched tweets you
generate
Number of search engine referred website
visitors
Social marketing optimization Number of click-throughs on links to your
other social media efforts
Drive sales Number of E-Commerce sales generated by
Twitter referred traffic
Number of repeat sales
Number of qualified leads that convert into

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sales
Number of sales referred by a Twitter
customer
Affiliate marketing Number of new Twitter referred affiliate sign-
ups
Amount of sales generated by Twitter referred
affiliates
7. How to use Twitter in the best way possible for businesses?
i. Customer Support – Twitter can be used as a public complaint department. If a company
has a presence on Twitter, irrespective of whether it wants or not, it will become a
customer support channel for thecompany.
ii. Manage positive and negative tweets – If the tweet is positive – retweet it. Then tweet
back with a thank you, expressing how glad you are that they’ve had a good experience
with your product. You can even mention a sale or a new product coming out soon. If
the tweet is negative – address the issue and offer a solution. Treat your Twitter
conversations with customers as you would a face-to-face interaction: be friendly,
enthusiastic, and polite. If you have a angry customer, don’t fire back with rage but
rather shower them with quality help and kindness to put out their flames.
iii. Research your target market – Twitter is one of the best places for ecommerce
entrepreneurs to get info for growing their onlinestore.
iv. Research your competition and heroes – If competitors are already on Twitter, learn
from their success and failures beforepumping out tweets.
v. What should be tweeted ? – The company can tell everyone about sales and answer
questions, but what's really going to grow the company’s following is daily and
continuous "small-talk" - whereas you're talking about anything and everything with
your following. Thebelow points can also betried:
 Sales, discounts, and new products
 Ask fun questions
 Ask for opinions on which new prototypeyour Twitter community likes best
 Ask about their favoriteproducts and brands
 Offer to send them free stuff.
 Tweet fun pictures of your product and ask your followers to do thesame
 Tweet recent blog posts
 Interesting & related YouTubevideos aregreat
 Industry infographics
 Famous quotes that arerelated to your industry