While Facebook may be the most popular social media site,
Twitter is perhaps the most prolific social media site in the world. Content
from Twitter is constantly quoted in news articles,
has had a hand in the Arab Spring and other political demonstrations, and is growing in popularity amongst teens and other heavy users of mobile technology. In many ways, Twitter is one of the
most important social media sites to peruse during the course of online
research and investigations.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a microblogging site which allows users to tweet
text and links to pictures, videos, and other content in 140 characters or
less. Each user’s Twitter experience is customizable, as they select to follow
only the users that are of interest to them. The tweets from the followed users
appear on the Twitter homepage. Additionally, each user has a Twitter profile
in which users can see the user’s last 3200 tweets, followers, followings, and
photos and videos.
Another important feature of Twitter is the hashtag. The
hashtag was first used on Twitter by users to communicate with one another about a specific topic and is now used
on a variety of other social media sites. By clicking on a hashtag, users can execute
a real-time search across Twitter to find tweets containing the same hashtag. That
search can be sorted by top tweets, all tweets, or tweets from known users. It
can also be saved for later use.
What Can You Learn
from Twitter?
A screenshot of the JFK
trending topic
Twitter allows researchers and analysts to gather a wealth
of information about any individual or topic of interest. More than half of all
Twitter users leverage the site to access news coverage.
Similarly, many users post live coverage of events occurring around them, and
Twitter is testing a breaking news feature which allows them to alert users of breaking news in their area. By utilizing
hashtags and trending topics, researchers can find information on almost
anything of interest.
The amount of information Twitter contains about any given
user is astonishing. Using advanced search techniques, you can read every tweet
made by an individual user. These tweets can contain information regarding a
person’s habits, interests, general disposition, social networks, and
locations. Additionally, with the amount of social media applications that push
content to Twitter, it makes it easy to quickly identify other social media
accounts of a person of interest.
How Can You Use
Information from Twitter?
How to leverage information from Twitter is entirely
dependent upon the needs of your research or investigation. If you are
monitoring topics or events using Twitter, you can use a variety of free and
paid tools to identify and capture Tweets using keyword or location-based
searches. Many of these tools have alert features built in which will tell you
when there are new posts about your topic or area of interest. Similarly, you
can also use free or paid tools to monitor and capture individual user’s
information.
Ultimately, Twitter is an excellent starting point for any
investigation. You can do broad based topic research to identify language patterns
and influencers of topics and events of interest. Once you identify your users
of interest, you can map out their social networks and movements to establish
patterns of behavior and identify even more sources of information. In the
future, we will be giving more in-depth tips on how to conduct these
investigations in another social media platforms series.
