1) The document discusses why analyzing Twitter usage data is important and provides examples of prior studies that have analyzed Twitter usage patterns and categorized tweets. 2) It identifies major categories of tweets including conversational, status updates, information passing, news sharing, and spam. It also describes minor subcategories. 3) The document presents the results of categorizing the author's own Twitter archive between 2007-2009, finding most tweets fell into conversational and status update categories. This showed Twitter is often used for personal exchanges not just broad broadcasting.

1. Twitter metrics and measure Why (more than how to) analyse Twitter Dr Stephen Dann School of Management Marketing & International Business, Australian National University @stephendann or stephen.dann@anu.edu.au

2. Why dissect a living medium?

3. Metrics What gets measured gets done What gets done can be measured What gets tweeted can be assembled into little diagrams with neat colour schemes

5. Why bother? “Okay, so if we’re going to do it, can it be done well?” “No?” “How about medium rare?”

6. Coding the Streams Krishnamurthy et al (2008) users were classified by follower/following counts, Numbers and ratios means and mechanisms of their engagement Web (61.7%), mobile/text (7.5%), software (22.4%) volume of use Tweets per time period http://www.thegreenhead.com/2008/09/slice-solutions-pie-pan-divider-creates-perfect-slices.php

7. Coding the Streams Java et al 2007 1,348,543 tweets 76,177 users April 01, to May 30, 2007 Four meta-categories daily chatter conversations information / URL sharing news reporting http://www.thegreenhead.com/2008/09/slice-solutions-pie-pan-divider-creates-perfect-slices.php

8. Analysis 2: The Quickening Jansen et al (2009) tweets with brand name expression of brand sentiment 13-week period April 4, 2008 to July 3, 2008. 650 reporting episodes 13 x 50 brands 149,472 tweets

9. Analysis 3: Oh, those guys Pear Analytics (2009) 2000 tweets 11am to 5pm 10 working days Six part classification news (3.6%), spam (3.75%), self-promotion (5.85%), pointless babble (40.55%) conversational (37.55%) pass-along value (8.70%).

10. Where’s the party @? Honeycutt and Herring (2009) four one-hour samples four-hour intervals 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, on January 11, 2008 Sample of 200 tweets coded with grounded methodology 1) Addressivity: Directs a message to another person 2) Reference: Makes reference to another person, but does not direct a message to him or her. 3) Emoticon: Used as part of an emoticon. 4) Email: Used as part of an email address. 5) Locational 'at': Signals where an entity is located. 6) Non-locational 'at': Used to represent the preposition 'at' other than in the sense of location. 7) Other: Uses not fitting into any other category,

11. Categories Naaman, Boase and Lai (2010) Sample of 400 tweets more than one category was assigned to a single message. Sampling frame 125,593 unique user IDs ‘ personal’ Twitter users 10 friends, 10 followers, 10 messages 911 users N = 350 users The Categories Information Sharing Self Promotion Opinions/Complaints Statements and Random Thoughts Me now Question to followers Presence Maintenance Anecdote (me) Anecdote (others)

12. Tweet, Tweet, Retweet danah boyd Scott Golder Gilad Lotan Microsoft! Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter Process of RT Preservation Shrtn Attribution / Authorship Rationale Amplify Entertain Comment Visible listening Agreement Support AOL/me too Self gain Self archive

13. The consistent theme People keep using Twitter for personal use. Discussions of “self” Pointless babble Conversational All criticisms of the use of twitter for pleasure and personal consumption

14. What Twitter looks like… … and how are people using Twitter? Twitter – www.twitter.com ‘ Sup?

15. Recoding the Platform Let’s do it my way

16. Theory and Ideology Useful versus Enjoyable Bohme (2006) outlines a propensity of society to classify technology of all forms into “ useful and therefore valuable” “ enjoyable, therefore irrelevant”. Böhme, G (2006) Technical Gadgetry: Technological Development in the Aesthetic Economy, Thesis Eleven, 86 (1): 54-66

17. Why do it? Twitter is not about the aggregate firehose Twitter is how you use it. Analysis: what (twitter history) as an indicator of how (use of the service)

18. Method Grounded Theory Broad categories based on / supported by six prior studies Sub categories developed from theory and data Bunch of different boxes for sorting the letters Personal Twitter History @stephendann 274 Following / 355 Followers 2841 messages Mar 13 2007 to Aug 18 2009 Sujathan (2009) “ Twitter to pdf ” software.

19. Categories and Results Doesn’t scale to the public sphere! Huzzah! NO MASS GENERALISATION POSSIBLE!

20. Major Categories Conversational Uses an @statement to address another user Status An answer to “What are you doing now?”. Pass along Tweets of endorsement of content News Identifiable news content which is not UGC Phatic Content independent connected presence Spam Junk traffic, unsolicited automated posts, and other automated tweets generated without user consent

21. Minor Categories Conversational 1. Query 2. Referral 3. Action 4. Response Status 1. Personal 2. Temporal 3. Location 4. Mechanical 5. Physical 6. Work 7. Activity Pass along 1. RT 2. UGC 3. Endorsement News 1. Headlines 2. Sport 3. Event 4. Weather Phatic 1. Greeting 2. Fourth wall 3. Broadcast 4. Unclassifiable Spam

22. Results - @stephendann

23. Questions [email_address] Or @stephendann

24. Twitter! (What is it good for?) health community (Berger 2009) public libraries (Cahill 2009, Cuddy 2009) political campaigns (Cetina 2009, Henneburg et al 2009) business (Dudley 2009; Power and Forte 2008) journalism (Ettama 2009) civil unrest and protests (Fahmi 2009) social activism (Galer-Unti 2009) live coverage of events (Gay et al 2009) eyewitness accounts (Lariscy et al 2009) government (Macintosh 2009) education (Parslow 2009).

25. Uses and usage casual listening platform Crawford 2009 creating the illusion of physicality Hohl 2009 sense of connectedness and relationship Henneburg et al 2009 venue for conversation Steiner 2009

26. References Böhme, G (2006) Technical Gadgetry: Technological Development in the Aesthetic Economy, Thesis Eleven, 86 (1): 54-66 Cetina, K K 2009, What is a Pipe? bama and the Sociological Imagination, Theory, Culture & Society 2009 26(5): 129–140 Crawford, K (2009)'Following you: Disciplines of listening in social media',Continuum,23:4,525 — 535 Dudley, E 2009, Editorial: Lines of Communication, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 2009; 41; 131-134 Ettama, J 2009 New media and new mechanisms of public accountability, Journalism 2009; 10; 319-321 Fahmi, W S 2009, Bloggers' street movement and the right to the city. (Re)claiming Cairo's real and virtual "spaces of freedom", Environment and Urbanization 2009; 21; 89-107 Galer-Unti, R 2009, Guerilla Advocacy: Using Aggressive Marketing Techniques for Health Policy Change, Health Promotion Practice, 10; 325-327 Gay, P Plait, P, Raddick, J, Cain, F and Lakdawalla, E (2009) "Live Casting: Bringing Astronomy to the Masses in Real Time", CAP Journal, June 26-29 Henneburg, S. Scammell, M and O'Shaughnessy, N (2009) Political marketing management and theories of democracy, Marketing Theory 2009; 9; 165-188 Honeycutt, C and Herring, S C (2009) Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter, (2009). Proceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-42). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. 1-10, http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/honeycutt.herring.2009.pdf Jansen, B, Zhang, M, Sobel, K and Chowdury, A (2009) Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(11):2169–2188, 2009 http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/academic/jansen_twitter_electronic_word_of_mouth.pdf Java, A, Song, X, Finin, T and Tseng, B (2007) Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities, Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop ’07 , August 12, 2007, p 56-65

27. References Krishnamurthy, B, Gill, P and Arlitt, M (2008) A Few Chirps About Twitter, WOSN'08, August 18, 2008, 19-24 Lariscy, R Avery, E J, Sweetser, K and Howes, P 2009 An examination of the role of online social media in journalists’ source mix, Public Relations Review 35 (2009) 314–316 Macintosh, A 2009, The emergence of digital governance, Significance, December, 176-178 Naaman, M, Boase, J and Lai, C-H (2010) Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams, CSCW 2010, February 6–10 Parslow, G, 2009, Commentary: Twitter for Educational Networking, BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EDUCATION Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 255–256, 2009 Pear Analytics (2009) Twitter Study – August 2009, http://www.pearanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Twitter-Study-August-2009.pdf Power, R and Forte, D 2008, War & Peace in Cyberspace: Don’t twitter away your organisation’s secrets, Computer Fraud and Security, August, 18-20 Zhao, D and Rosson, M B, How and Why People Twitter: The Role that Micro-blogging Plays in Informal Communication at Work, GROUP’04, May 10–13, 2009, 243-252

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