Last Week in Tweet Traffic

[Disclaimer Alert: I work in Humana's Innovation Center, and have co-developed a tool we're calling myTPSreport.com. I have used this tool to gain tweet traffic insights and wanted to share them here. As with everything else in this blog, the thoughts below are my own and do not represent the thoughts of my employer]

I realize that we don’t like to look backwards, as a society, unless it’s some sort of Hair Metal special on Vh1, but a lot of news happened last week that was interesting to me so I figured I’d throw some stats together.. Could looking backward be the new looking forward? I’ll leave that one for the comments section… In the meantime, here is what tweet traffic looked like around topics that interested me this past week:

Haiti vs. Pat Robertson

Let’s start with the serious stuff first. We can all agree that what happened in Haiti was horrific, and it was a huge topic on Twitter this past week. I think it’s by far, the largest volume of tweets around a topic we’ve looked at on myTPSreport, which is still in beta mind you, so it’s definitely testing our capabilities:

– 143,830 Tweets
– 84,499 Users

Pat Robertson’s statements also generated a lot of buzz on Twitter this week. If you didn’t catch what he said, check it out here. Here are some volume numbers for the search term Pat Robertson:

– 2,963 Tweets
– 2,700 Users

Conan vs. Leno

People of Earth, when the news that Jay Leno would return to his previous spot in Late Night hit, Conan O’Brien reacted… and the Twitterverse reacted. Here is the run down:

– 41,215 Tweets
– 26,340 Users

Google vs. China

The story about Google and China was seriously compelling to me. A veritable Clash of the Titans if you will, that generated a lot of heat in the blogosphere, as well as traffic on the Twitter. To catch up on the whole ordeal, Mac Slocum had a great recap of the situation on O’Reilly Radar. Here is the twitter traffic:

– 1,196 Tweets
– 1,014 Users

So What?

Looking at the number of tweets compared to the number of tweeters can potentially give insight into the level of commitment that individuals have for a given a topic. For example, we can infer that there were a lot of people talking about Conan multiple times as opposed to the number of people talking about Google and China.

The overall volume of tweets for specific keywords can also start to show how successful a message is spreading via Twitter. And comparing tweet traffic between disparate topics, like entertainment and business/politics, can also start to show what people on Twitter tend to talk about.

We’re continuing to build out the functionality on myTPSreport, and I’m really excited about the possibilities. Let me know what you think in the comments below.