#social media research
Like New Social People
8 months of my tweets, distilled.
I love that phrase so much. Becoming new social people is, to me, exactly what we’re trying to do in my corner of the internet - trying to find new social forms and modes of relating across distance, across culture, anonymously and pseudonymously, as networked communities not just individuals. Understanding how new sites & platforms enable us to become new social people is why I am a social media researcher.
Like New Social People. Just found the title for my first book, y'all.
I am also obviously quite amused by how completely predictable the other keywords in there are. Only surprises: I don’t talk that much about “tech” or “technology” or “design” as such, despite Twitter Ads showing me that these are my audience’s main interests. I wonder if it would increase my engagement rate if I did? More on the temptations of a data-driven self in a blog post to come…
Method: quick and easy!
- Twitter export via ads.Twitter.com (I think everyone can access this? If not, pretend to sign up for Twitter Advertising then you get all your stats)
- In Excel, add to a previous export to get 8 months data (5 April - 5 Dec 2014)
- Sort alphabetically by tweet text, then code tweets as Original vs. @Reply
- Use Find-Replace to swap &for& (it was distorting the graph)
- Copy-paste all Original (non-reply) tweets into Wordle.net
- Wordle settings: top 200 words, guess case (so Socialandsocial are amalgamated), exclude common English words (and, to, if etc), sort alphabetically
- Manually exclude a couple of other common English words I overuse (just, actually, also) for a prettier graph
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