Trends #European Union: The power of microblogs

Over the past two years there has been an explosion in the number of microblogs, mainly through the websites Facebook and Twitter. These bits of information, hence the name “microblog”, give status updates and short commentary from a user that is viewable by all of the user’s friends or followers. Microblogging grew an astonishing 1400 percent from 2009-2010 and Twitter now sees over 50 million “tweets” per day.  Twitter and Facebook are free to use, easy to set up and accessible not only through a computer, but also through applications on mobile devices, providing the possibility for the entire public to microblog.

Marketing firms have jumped the opportunity to use this medium to campaign and conduct research for their clients. It is almost impossible to find a celebrity or politician who has also not begun to capitalize on this publicity tool. Almost all of the traffic that comes through this blog are people redirected from Facebook. These new media tools can generate what seems like limitless publicity for a person that uses these networks to their full potential. Google and the Library of Congress have begun to catalogue microblogs and you can now search on Google for “updates” which narrows your search strictly to microblogs. When this information becomes easily accessible through Google and Library of Congress, it will provide a vast, largely untapped, wealth of information.

Microblogs are extremely useful in exploring public opinion because of their widespread audience and ease of access; in 2010 everyone has become a journalist.  While gathering newspapers, blogs and television transcripts in the U.S. regarding the EU for May 2010, I also wanted to explore tweets. I doubted there have been or ever will be a day when #European Union becomes a trend shown on the Twitter homepage.

To explore this issue a search was conducted every day for tweets containing the phrase “European Union.” Each tweet was then logged and broken down into two categories: containing links and not containing links. A sample was also collected of information regarding the users who were tweeting about the EU. Total number of tweets, location and number of followers for the user were gathered.  The total number of tweets will give insight into total exposure on Twitter and the sample of users will provide a profile of the users who bother to Tweet about the EU. Tweets containing links will show the relationship between Twitter and other online media, such as blogs and newspapers.

In May Twitter users tweeted about the EU an average of 264 times per day. With over 50 million tweets per day, the EU accounts for .0005 percent of total Twitter traffic. Almost all of these tweets were links to other articles, indicating a strong relationship between the microblogosphere and other online media. A similar problem arises, that also came up when analyzing other media (see post) in determining if this is a high level of exposure relative to other similar subjects.

Establishing a profile of a user that tweets about the EU was an extremely difficult task. The variance in the number of microblogs users have tweeted since they joined the site was extreme: the mean was over 9,500 and the median was 2,953. If the median is used as the average, it would mean that users tweeted twice a day for the four years that Twitter has been in existence. This is staggering, and a wider sample of users must be looked at to explore why the variance was so high.

The number of followers was also examined because of the implications this has on determining total exposure. If a user has 1,000 followers, 1,000 other users will see this tweet on their phone, computer or Twitter equipped device, compounding the level of exposure. Again, there was a huge amount of variance in the sample. The median amount of followers a user had was 359. With an average of 264 tweets per day, and 359 people viewing each of these tweets, 94,776 Twitter users are viewing tweets about the EU daily. This number is possibly inflated because a single user who followed multiple users’ who tweeted about the EU was not accounted for. This number, however, vividly shows the influence that a microblogging site like Twitter possesses.

Lastly, the location of the user was examined. This was taken into account as there was no way to search for only users that are located within the United States. Tweets were limited to English, but this obviously will not narrow the results to only the Anglo-Saxon world. This was also the most problematic part of the study because listing your location is voluntary. Users do not have to disclose their location, can create a fictional location, or even lie that they are located somewhere they are not.

Keeping these limits in mind, the results were at follows. Over 35 percent of user locations could not be identified. Users that listed their location within the U.S. made up a little over 29 percent and both the EU and countries outside the U.S. and the EU, categorized as “Other,” accounted for around 18 percent. It would be interesting to conduct a similar study with an expanded search to include the additional 22 languages of the EU. I am doubtful that including 22 more languages would yield many more tweets, due to the fact that most EU specific news sources are published in English, and most tweets contained links to outside media.

Does the EU receive high exposure on Twitter? Again this is difficult to say relative to other subjects, but looking at the huge volume of tweets per day, it can be concluded that the EU composes a minute proportion of daily traffic. Twitter and other microblog sites produce a vast amount of information every second that can be exploited to look into the public’s opinion on a wide variety of subjects. This strictly quantitative study is only a rough exploration of a new form of media that is going to play an important role in future research, in not only political science, but across all disciplines.