Twitter Trend Conspiracies
Over the past week there has been some concern over whether or not Twitter censors trending topics according to what is deemed controversial or what has bad publicity. The idea is troublesome, but I feel the sentiment is driven more by misunderstanding of how Twitter works and over-projecting the demographics in certain spheres of influence.
A statistic that gets thrown around a lot is that 25% of the Twitter population is Black.
That by itself is a little troubling.
How does one identify the race of a user if they are never asked to self-identify? That metric is a guess at best.
It’s also said that “Black Twitter” influences the trending topics on many occasions based on vernacular or slang that we regularly use.
Again, that may be true, but are we sure that the “biggest actual consumers of Hip Hop music is the white teenage demographic” clause doesn’t come into play here?
Still though that’s not the real issue here.
Let’s look at some recent “statistics“.
As of July 2011 :
There are about 200,000,000 registered twitter users.
About half a million new accounts are created daily.
About 50% of users update their status every day.
24% of users check their twitter feed several times a day.
61% of tweets are in English.
70% of twitter users are OUTSIDE of the US.
180,000,000 tweets are posted every day.
Let’s think about this more…
Since only 30% of twitter users are American, it’s reasonable to say that of the Black population, many of them may be non-American as well…especially since they did not specifically say “African American”, but the phenotype “Black”
Of that 25% of Black people on Twitter, how many are :
High school kids
College kids
The 24-34 group
The 34+ group
American
Non American
English speaking
Have active accounts
Etc.
When you drill down, “spheres of influence” really become quite small when factoring in the other aspects of twitter’s users.
Now to make something tend worldwide or even in the US, it’s not about how often you yourself tweet a hashtag, it’s about a critical number steadily tweeting keywords over a steady period of time. It’s how an hour long show being watched by 15 million people can trend easily especially if it’s being shown at two different times (east coast/west coast), while an event of interest by a niche audience cannot (ie. Occupy.WallStreet or Tro.y Dav.is). It’s even harder when there’s no specific word or phrase to rally behind.
To make the niche topics trend, you have to consider the time of day (around 5 after work but before the Primetime shows come on tv), the audience, (you need MILLIONS of people consistently tweeting for a significant amount of time…not just 2 tweets and that’s it), and a central hashtag or phrase (#teampluribus) tacked on to every tweet for a certain amount of time in a non-primetime slot by millions of people.
THAT’S what makes things trend.
It’s not likely that twitter conspiracies happen, it’s more likely that you simply need more people. It’s easy to think something is a big deal if your twitter niche is all talking about it, but just like in real life, things your friends think is important don’t always carry the same weight with people who have different priorities and interests.
If you want to get the word out, branch out to other forms of media to create awareness…so people will come back to twitter to talk about it.
In the case of Tro.y Davi.s, call up Stev.e Har.vey, To.m Joine.r, Michae.l Bais.den, and other popular nationally syndicated DJ’s. Get them to talk about it and get them to come together on a hash tag to use.
That would get the issue trending quickly…especially given the time of day they’re all on the air.
I bet though that this will trend as his execution time nears.
Still though, it takes work and consistency! Get to it!
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