The Guardian remembers what Twitter is all about
Image: The Guardian
The Guardian has been widely derided for its 'obsession' with Twitter. However, the site has been useful in delivering hits for the paper's website, not least in the field of technology (GuardianTech has over 1.5m followers).
There are also now an impressive number of Guardian journos tweeting, but it has become noticeable that most have had twitter feeds set up for them and are not actually engaging with anyone. Each time a story is published by an author a link is automatically added to their feed. Have a look at most journalists' feeds and you will simply find a long list of bit.ly links. It was becoming a bit dull and seemed as if the paper that seemed to understand the site first was beginning to forget why it was different to an RSS feed.
It was a great revelation therefore today when that the Guardian announced it was "putting humans" on the Guardian Politics feed for the election "to tweet, retweet and do some talking". It seems all is now back right with the twitterverse.
Why Twitter is far from ‘pointless’
Ricky Gervais quit "pointless" Twitter. Image: see below
Yesterday I wrote a story for the Guardian about Ricky Gervais quitting Twitter, branding the site as "pointless" and the adults who use it "undignified".
The article has however illustrated why Twitter is more powerful than pointless, especially for the media. The story did ridiculously well on the site- it was the most viewed news story of the day on the site and received 250 comments (not all positive I must say, my favourite: "an utterly rubbish story").
Part of the reason for the success of the article, which admittedly is far from groundbreaking journalism, promotion on Twitter. It was linked to by several of the Guardian's Twitter feeds, including Guardian Tech, which has over 1.5m followers. In turn these tweets were retweeted, leading to over 600 people linking to the story on Twitter.
It is too easy to exaggerate the effects of Twitter. For example, in practice it has not yet significantly changed the engagement of voters with politicians. However, it can be a useful tool. It is a shame that Gervais did not follow anyone on his account, he might have found out that it is great for two way communication as well as self-promotion. But if he doesn't think it is for him, fair enough.
Becoming a ‘Twitter quitter’ is the new must-do
Becoming a 'twitter quitter' is the new on-trend must-do. Lily Allen quietly ended her tweeting at the end of September. At the start of October Miley Cyrus quit, leaving 1.1 million followers behind. Then over the weekend Stephen Fry threatened to quit, but later backed down saying he was more sheepish than a sheep. The growth of Twitter quitting has raised the question of how the media use tweets and how wise it is for celebs to be online.
Miley Cyrus said she thinks Twitter should be banned after questioning how the media used her tweets as the source for news stories. Image: The Insider
Fry tweeted that he was considering leaving the site after fellow user brumplum described his tweets as boring. The twitter fall-out and following make-up was picked up by several websites and newspapers. On brumplum's blog he wrote: "For a major newspaper to pick up a spat between users of an ultimately insignificant glorified chatroom is absolutely mind-boggling. To make a national (and international) story of it is beyond silliness."
On Monday the Guardian's PDA blog described how "news organisations pick up stories from Twitter as if it were a wire service." The quantity of stories generated from twitter feeds has been increasing, but is nothing new. There have been a wide range of stories trickling into the press over the last few months, some more worthy than others.
One of the weaker examples being the Sun's story, 'Sport aces, 15, Tweet hearts,' about the tweets of Olympic diver Tom Daley. The article started: "Diver Tom Daley has been bombarding fellow teen sports star Laura Robson with flirty Twitter messages - sparking rumours of a budding relationship." The only two messages he had sent her were "hey just thought I'd say good luck for your next tournament : ) your doing awesome : D" and "good luck in your US tournament : ) x" 'Bombard' and 'flirty' may not have been the most accurate descriptions.
Miley Cyrus made a rap on YouTube to mark her departure from the site, in which she said that everything she typed was taken by 'lame gossip sites' and made into news. Since she has said Twitter should be "banned from this universe."
However, on the whole surely what is said on twitter is fair game. It is naive to think that tweets are conversations that are off-limits for journalists. They are statements made in the public sphere and unless you protect your updates they are available for the whole world to see.
It seems that celebrities and their PRs are finally seeing that social networking can provide both promotional opportunities and pitfalls.
As one publicist told the LA Times, "Giving some celebrities Twitter is like giving a kid a loaded gun. Twitter can be enormously valuable as a branding tool. But like everything else, it's a double-edged sword, and if you have impulse control problems -which strangely a lot of celebrities seem to have - it can be very dangerous."
It will be interesting to see how celebrity tweeting develops and whether PRs will have a more active role in controlling their clients' social networking. As the Washington Post reports there is the problem that accounts filtered by PRs sound like infomercials, while the public also do not take to phoney accounts not being written by the celebrity at all.
Tracking trends on twitter
The influence of twitter has been widely debated in the last couple of weeks. Trafigura's super-injunction on the Guardian was lifted after editor Alan Rusbridger's tweets about the restrictions were re-tweeted on mass. Users then united in disgust at Jan Moir's Daily Mail article about the death of Stephen Gately, leading to record complaints to the Press Complaints Commission. While it is debatable how events would have panned out without twitter, it must be agreed that the speed and size of the reaction to the Trafigura and Moir cases must be attributed to the site.
This week it was the turn of Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time to become the hot-topic of twitter, with over a thousand tweets a minute using the #bbcqt hash tag during the programme. Between 11 and 12 on Thursday night 4.8% of all tweets mentioned #bbcqt.
There are several websites that are useful when tracking the most popular topics on twitter. Below are a few that I have tried out. Other useful sites can be found in this article on Mashable, which includes a list of iPhone applications for tracking trends.
What the trend? explains in a concise summary why a word or phrase is on the top trends list. Its explanations have started to be used on the main twitter site for some trending topics. It is a quick tool to find out why certain words are popular on twitter at a particular time.
monitter allows you to track tweets in real time. You choose which keywords you want to monitor and then the site displays the most recent tweets using those words, automatically refreshing. You can simultaneously follow several keywords on different columns, the number of which you can increase and decrease. It is particularly useful when following tweets of live events.
Trendistic provides graphs that show the popularity of keywords over a day, week or month. The charts allow you to see when trends started and how they develop showing the percentage of all tweets which mention particular words each day or each hour.
If you search 'Moir' on 16 October, you can see the growth of the tweeting about Jan Moir's Stephen Gately article through the day. There were boosts after popular twitter users Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown and Stephen Fry started to mention the controversial article at 11:42am, 12:05pm and 12:27pm respectively. However, the charts show that the article had started to become high-profile even before the big-guns started to tweet. 'Moir' was used in 0.19% of tweets between 10 and 11, increased to 0.41% in the hour in which Brooker tweets and then peaked at 0.61% in the hour that Fry and Brown first mentioned Moir. Between 4 and 5pm, 0.23% of all tweets mentioned 'StephenFry'.
Trendistic is also useful for seeing how trends, for topics such as swine flu, change over the long-term.
Trendistic graph showing the percentage of all tweets on twitter including the word 'Moir' on 16 October
Twit news
This week several news sources, including the Guardian and Press Association, reported that Sarah Brown had overtaken Stephen Fry to become 'Britain's highest profile Twitter user’. The story was true in so far as she does now have more followers than Fry (currently standing at 788,049 to his 722,726), but embarrassingly there are several British Twitter users with many more followers, including Lily Allen who has 1.5 million.
The story of the rise of Sarah Brown is certainly an interesting one; the last year has seen her public profile completely transformed, and most commentators, including her predecessor Cherie Blair, have praised the way she has dealt with the press. The use of Twitter by political parties is also of interest particularly following Barack Obama’s successful use of social media and as Britain heads closer to an election. It is especially important for Labour as experts say that at least in this field they are currently ahead of the Tories. However, a story that combines these two elements should not forget the facts. For now at least Sarah Brown is not Britain’s highest profile Twitter user.
As to where she stands in the league table of British Twitter users it seems we still do not know. On Friday Metro produced a Top 10 list that placed Sarah Brown at number 7, but that too was flawed omitting BBC Five Live’s Richard Bacon who has over a million followers, so who knows where she really stands.
