TwitSprout Blog

Most Retweeted Tweets from Twitter's Elite

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:45:00 -0500

As of yesterday, Twitter has uncapped the retweet totals for all accounts on Twitter. You won’t see these changes reflected on Twitter.com (where they still display 50+ Retweets), but we’ve done our research to discover the most retweeted tweets by Twitter’s elite! The results are funny, inspiring and at times just plain ridiculous.

We’ve selected the Top 10 accounts on Twitter with over 10 Million Followers. A list that most recently includes @selenagomez.

The tweets below were discovered based on an analysis of the last 3,200 tweets sent by each account. TwitSprout used the most recent retweet count to determine which tweets caught fire!

Here’s the summary…

1. @justinbieber Tweet

On the 10th of January, 2012, Justin Bieber retweeted one of Floyd Mayweather’s tweets. This tweet went on to receive 92,314 Retweets! Now that’s evidence of the Bieber-bump in action.

Top Tweet: 92,314 Retweets

Manny Pacquiao I’m calling you out let’s fight May 5th and give the world what they want to see.
— Floyd Mayweather (@FloydMayweather) January 10, 2012

I wonder if Justin knew, when he wrote this ALL-CAPS tweet back in November of 2011, that it would live on to be the most retweeted tweet from the infamous @justinbieber account. Coming in at a whopping 87,882 retweets is Justin’s tribute tweet to LMFAO.

Top Tweet: 87,882 Retweets

I’M SEXY AND I KNOW IT
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) November 21, 2011

2. @kimkardashian Tweet

This is a heartwarming tweet. Kim Kardashian calls on Twitter to help fulfill the wish of a 15 year old girl who has terminal cancer. On a Thursday morning, in June of 2011, that wish came true. The hashtag #alicebucketlist was trending on Twitter. This tweet from @KimKardashian received 71,740 retweets.

Top Tweet: 71,740 Retweets

A 15 year old girl who is terminal w/ cancer has made a bucket list. 1 of her wishes is to trend on Twitter. Give a RT #alicebucketlist
— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) November 27, 2011

3. @ladygaga Tweet

This inspirational tweet from Lady Gaga received 32,466 retweets in June 2011. This is the most retweeted tweet of all time from @ladygaga.

Top Tweet: 32,466 Retweets

Never be afraid to dream.
— Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) June 17, 2011

4. @rihanna Tweet

Rihanna was quick to congratulate Beyonce and Jay-Z on the birth of their first child, Blue Ivy Carter. This tweet from Rihanna received 30,991 retweets earlier this month!

Top Tweet: 30,991 Retweets

Welcome to the world princess Carter! Love Aunty Rih
— Rihanna (@rihanna) January 8, 2012

5. @selenagomez Tweet

Selena Gomez recently joined the list of celebrities with over 10 million followers on Twitter. Her tweet on July 12, 2011 received 28,108 retweets. Selena is supporting the new single “Skyscraper” from Demetria Lovato (@ddlovato). This is Selena’s most retweeted tweet of all time. Katy Perry is also a big fan of Skyscraper, as you’ll see below.

Top Tweet: 28,108 Retweets

SO, SO proud of @ddlovato #skyscraper Incredible, beautiful and so inspiring..
— Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) July 12, 2011

6. @taylorswift13 Tweet

Taylor Swift shared this tweet with the world on her 22nd birthday, December 13th 2011. Her tweet received 25,762 retweets last month as fans celebrated with her - the most retweeted tweet from her account ever, at least until she turns 23.

Top Tweet: 25,762 Retweets

I’m so 22 right now.
— taylorswift13 (@taylorswift13) December 13, 2011

7. @katyperry Tweet

Another big fan of Demetria Lovato, Katy Perry joins Selena Gomez (tweet above) to congratulate Demetria on her new single, Skyscraper. This tweet from @katyperry received 25,597 retweets. These tweets may have contributed to @ddlovato’s explosive growth on Twitter, now nearing 6 million followers.

Top Tweet: 25,597 Retweets

The new song Skyscraper by @ddlovato is pure perfection. Her voice is one of the BEST undiscovered beauties. Can’t wait for the full record.
— Katy Perry (@katyperry) July 13, 2011

8. @britneyspears Tweet

Britney is struck with a little Bieber Fever and receives over 20 thousand retweets - her most retweeted tweet of all time.

Top Tweet: 20,820 Retweets

Just got my @JustinBieber Never Say Never DVD. #BieberFever -Britney
— Britney Spears (@britneyspears) May 14, 2011

9. @barackobama Tweet

Coming in 9th on our list is Barack Obama. Obama has been a big supporter of social media, running a live Twitter Town Hall in July 2011 and the first presidential Google+ Hangout only days ago. It all started with his “Yes we can” campaign for the presidency. Very suiting that his most retweeted tweet of all time is this tweet from March 2010 with 17,570 retweets. Well done Mr. President. You certainly have achieved celebrity status in the world of social media.

Top Tweet: 17,570 Retweets

Yes we can.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) March 22, 2010

10. @shakira Tweet

Shakira presents her “sunshine” in this photo of the couple on March 29th, 2011. The tweet received 7,268 retweets and the photo on twitpic nearly 700,000 views!

Top Tweet: 7,248 Retweets

Les presento a mi sol… Shak http://twitpic.com/4enu8t
— Shakira (@shakira) March 29, 2011

Just for fun, lets look at some of the heavyweights in social media news, Mashable (@mashable) and TechCrunch (@techcrunch).

@mashable

Mashable tweets 70 tweets/day on average with links to the latest articles on Mashable.com. We analyzed the past 3200 tweets from @Mashable to discover the most retweeted tweet. Two months ago, on December 5th 2011, Mashable posted something we can all relate to: auto-correct. Their tweet below received 2,297 retweets.

Top Tweet: 2,297 Retweets

Damn You Auto Correct Reveals 9 Funniest Texts of the Year - on.mash.to/u040tr
— Pete Cashmore (@mashable) December 5, 2011

@techcrunch

TechCunch tweets close to 60 tweets/day and their most retweeted tweet speaks to the growing global anti-SOPA movement. Google collected 4.5 million signatures and this tweet from @TechCrunch received nearly one thousand retweets.

Top Tweet: 997 Retweets

Google Collected 4.5 Million Anti-SOPA Signatures Today tcrn.ch/xnKJTM
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) January 19, 2012

Twitter has become one of the richest data sources in history. We are thrilled that Twitter is now providing accurate retweet totals from within their API. I’m sure these new retweet totals will be revealed on Twitter.com soon.

TwitSprout is continuing to analyze tweets from other Twitter accounts for more insights. All these analytics and will be made available to TwitSprout users soon. Join now (for free) to be one of the first with access to retweet activity of your account and any competitors.

Meet the Founders

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:30:00 -0500

Top Left (@abh1nv) | Bottom Left (@dHolowack)
Photo credits: Elisa Prajogo @eprajogo

Abhi @abh1nv

Abhi is the “swiss army knife” of TwitSprout. As the technical co-founder he is always focused on improving TwitSprout’s products and exceeding all user expectations. Abhi has a Systems Design Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and worked for Amazon before joining TwitSprout. He is a problem-solver, a very good one, and will do whatever it takes to get the job done. Abhi worked for days (without sleep) to bring the Obama Town Hall infographic to life. He knows how to grow and scale a platform in the cloud. Our Obama page performed without a hiccup even after being published on CNN and Mashable. That’s not all, Abhi is responsible for the whiz-bang features that make an awesome user experience. He also works directly with our larger clients.

You’ll likely find Abhi building a computer, then rebuilding it for more power. He looks at everything as a system, something to be dissected, analyzed and optimized - including our products. He’s done an excellent job at maintaining and monitoring theever growing number of servers we have online. Abhi and I have already worn out our first coffee machine here at the office (it was a sad day). Offer him a double-double and he’ll always make time to chat about social media, web technology, networking, cars and more.

Dan @dHolowack

Many of you know me already. I’m the voice behind our Twitter account @TwitSprout, sending Thank-You’s and connecting directly with many of our awesome users. I love data, social media data specifically. I learned from a young age the value of bridging the gap from data & information to insight & intelligence. I also graduated from Systems Design Engineering (the same class as Abhi) and was leading business intelligence initiatives across many industries, from high-tech to finance to healthcare, before focusing on social media. I’m the most happy when spending time with our users. Seriously, you all rock. When I designed the first one-page dashboard I couldn’t have predicted the incredible response and where this journey was going to lead me (and us as a team). We’re now extending our platform beyond account-level analytics to cutting edge work in real-time stream processing and social media monitoring.

The TwitSprout platform has come a long way. We’ll be sharing a sneak preview over the holidays before launching the full service in 2012. And there will always be an awesome free plan - we want to recognize the early adopters that have shared such insightful and valuable feedback!

There has been a very high volume of beta requests. We’re working hard to bring everyone on board.

If there is anything you need, a question answered or new feature request, just say hello! Twitter (@TwitSprout / @dHolowack) or email - hello [at] twitsprout . com

Cheers,
Dan & Abhi

PS: The answer is yes, trampoline photo-shoots are super fun. Recommended.

MLB Grand Slam Tweets. Yankees #postseason

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 02:00:41 -0400

It’s the MLB postseason. As Major League Baseball is one of the most popular sports in America this means a surge of tweets from fans supporting their clubs with comments about the games.

We were curious how fans across America react to events within the game - such as double plays, diving catches and home runs. Most people watch TV with their laptop or iPhone these days. We all have a need to engage with other fans while watching sports - this is why people watch games at a friend’s house or the local pub. Engaging in conversation (even tweeting) can complete the experience.

So how do people tweet during MLB playoff games? Check out our graph below.

[MLB Tweets by the Minute]

This graph shows the volume of MLB tweets per minute - it’s like the heartbeat of social-America as they react to the game. The game featured here is Game 1 - Detroit Tigers vs New York Yankees. There was a Grand Slam at 10:18PM EDT. We noticed that even if you were not watching the game live (only viewing this chart) it would be obvious when the biggest moments in the game were. The spike of conversation for the grand slam was significant!

So, could we take this one step further? Could you determine all major highlights of the game programmatically? Sure. I wonder if anyone has tested this theory.

Powerade believes that Twitter has become the second screen when big sporting events are occurring. Check out their Twitter experiment and video - Twitter Campaign shows the Power of Football.

It’s Thanksgiving here in Canada. Have a wonderful long weekend everyone!

Cheers,

Dan & the TwitSprout Team

40K Tweets per Minute Celebrate Steve Jobs

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:54:00 -0400

It’s a sad evening here at TwitSprout headquarters. I was on a Skype call when our co-founder, Adrian, looked over at me from above his monitor - a somber expression on his face - and mouthed the words, “Steve Jobs just died.”

My heart sank. I ended the call. At this moment the entire world began reflecting together on the brilliant innovations Steve Jobs introduced that enrich all our lives. To most of us in technology, in product design, in user experience and beyond, Steve Jobs was not just the CEO of Apple, he was a hero.

Twitter ignited with tweets about Steve Jobs. We started tracking the following keywords at 7:54 PM EST: #stevejobs, stevejobs and “Steve Jobs”. The activity peaked at over 42,000 tweets / minute. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter announces this was one of the highest activity events (if not the highest) in Twitter’s history. A testament to Steve Jobs and his profound impact on the world. A snapshot of the tweet volume graph (in tweets per minute) is shown above.

Within minutes President Obama, Bill Gates and others shared heartfelt statements about Steve Jobs. Google updated their homepage to read “Steve Jobs, 1955, 2011”.

You are an inspiration. Thank you, Steve.

-The TwitSprout Team

Taking the Emmys by Storm

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:28:00 -0400

Earlier this week Twitter launched a new framework for developers called Storm. The details of Storm are highly technical and I don’t pretend to understand exactly how it works (we’ll leave it to our awesome developers & co-founders Adrian @apetresc and Abhi @abh1nv for that). I do know this system is important to the future of mobile and web apps - especially related to social media, and here’s why.
Warning: the following is my attempt to describe Storm at a high level. If you just want to see the Emmys in action please skip to the video.

Storm allows you to analyze a stream of information in real-time. Hmmm… still too technical? Okay. First, lets talk about a “stream”. There are two ways to get information. One method is to simply ask for it, over and over again, which is a lot of work. You must continue asking to see if there is anything new available. The second method is one where new information is given to you, immediately, if and when it is available. This is obviously superior to asking repeatedly. Storm essentially helps computers handle the second case, where information is fed to the computer as a constant stream.

Receiving and storing information is easy, analyzing it on-the-fly is hard. Storm provides a highly scalable framework to help us analyze data from the stream as it arrives. We expected Storm to be powerful and quickly discovered it’s easy to use as well. The next question for us was how to experiment with it. And as a company of social media data geeks, this was the fun part.

The 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards were broadcast live the night before Storm was released. Adrian setup a process to capture tweets about the Emmys, ~188,000 tweets in total. We probably missed a few tweets, but that’s okay as this was not the focus of our experiment. TwitSprout built an internal tool to replay the stream of tweets as if the Emmys were occurring right now. We can also speed up and slow down the playback to simulate tweet volume from many different sizes of events.

Now let us suggest an interesting question and apply Storm to our massive pool of Emmy tweets to find the answer. We were curious which TV shows received the most buzz on Twitter. Determining this after the fact is very straight forward - simply add up the tweets and you’re done. The trick is visualizing the relevant tweets for each show as they occur on Twitter in real-time. Replaying the Emmy tweets through Storm actually highlights the crowds reaction on Twitter to key events happening on stage. You will notice a surge in mentions about Modern Family or The Daily Show when they win awards. Tweet activity is also influenced by what the speaker mentions on camera.

What you’re about to see is very cool. We spent an entire night working on this experiment. The first time we played the 188,000 Emmy tweets through our system the entire team was cheering for their favorite TV show as they competed for top rank.

To achieve these results we asked Storm to filter tweets by specific keywords and group these keywords into categories. Each category is a TV show. Below is a list of the TV shows and keywords used. We realize this list could be more refined & complete but it was very late and we were eager to finally test our experiment.

TV Show Keyword Filters

GLEE (“glee”, “msleamichele”, “colfer”),

GAME_OF_THRONES (“#got”, “thrones”),

MODERN_FAMILY (“modern family”, “modernfamily”, “burrell”, “bowen”),

MILDRED_PIERCE (“mildred”, “winslet”, “pierce”),

BIG_BANG_THEORY (“big bang theory”, “big bang”, “sheldon”, “parsons”),

OFFICE (“office”, “carell”, “dunder”, “mifflin”),

SATURDAY_NIGHT_LIVE (“snl”, “saturday night live”),

PARKS_AND_REC (“parks”, “poehler”, “recreation”),

DAILY_SHOW (“daily show”, “stewart”),

COLBERT (“colbert”),

I applaud Adrian’s execution on this. He learned Storm’s framework in less than 24 hours and programmed a very engaging demonstration. Adrian also recorded his code development as a live screencast to help other programmers learn Storm. Abhi is responsible for the awesome graph visualization, without which we would only see streaming lines of code :| Thank you!

I should mention that we have increased the speed of these tweets 60 times, meaning one minute in real time is equal to 1 second in the video (1min = 1 second). This allows us to replay a the Emmys in 2 minutes :)
Let’s get to it! Full screen the video to watch the results.

We would love to see your response in the comments below.
What should we analyze next? I’m excited to find out.

Love,
Dan, Adrian & Abhi

Obama's Other Crisis

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 22:26:00 -0400

With only hours to go before America is forced to default on its loans, President Obama took to Twitter to try and get everyone to compromise. He put out well over a hundred tweets in the course of a few hours, all with a common theme:

Although each of these tweets were useful to a large number of people, all of them together were useful to absolutely nobody — and it showed. Within minutes of beginning this tweet barrage, people began unfollowing @BarackObama en masse:

The over 30,000 net lost followers is taken after counting the 20,000 followers that Obama would normally expect to gain on a Friday — that’s over 50,000 lost followers for Obama, and the first time in a very long time that he’s had a net loss over an entire day. To put thing in perspective, though, these 50,000 followers represent only 0.53% of his total follower base, so it’s not exactly time for a re-election just yet!

To see a more detailed breakdown of @BarackObama’s account activity, head on down to our official Obama Dashboard, and don’t forget to sign up for TwitSprout if you want your very own!

Adrian at TwitSprout

We Love You More

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 21:00:00 -0400

You know me as Dan at TwitSprout. I know you as Matt, David, Chip, Laura, Jamie, and so many more. The truth is, I absolutely love interacting with our growing beta team. We have a manifesto posted here at TwitSprout HQ that reads: Our users will be family. You bring TwitSprout to life and I continue to learn from each and every tweet, live chat, phone call and email. Your recommendations have directly impacted our roadmap on so many occasions - including printing to PDF.

With your help we’ve reached our next milestone: 100 reviews and testimonials. I’m amazed and humbled by the response. One of the most rewarding parts of being an entrepreneur is simply creating something useful. Something that causes people to say, “You just made my job easier.”

The word cloud below was created from the 100+ TwitSprout reviews on Oneforty. This is how you describe TwitSprout.

Product development and customer service are one. We understand the best new features are often inspired by those who use the product. People like you! And who better to speak directly with our users than the CEO himself? I’ve been known to call flash brainstorm sessions after a Live Chat with our users - totally charged by some new idea. Whiteboard marker in hand, we begin to mock up a prototype and schedule work. I’m proud of the team’s focus on ensuring our users have the absolute greatest experience and possible.

It was years ago when I first started using Twitter for personal branding and networking. I remember at that time there were very few tools that effectively tracked account growth. In the beginning, I recorded my Total Follower count daily in a spreadsheet. It’s frustrating that Twitter only stores the current state of these stats without any historical access - you must resort to regularly recording the data with a timestamp. And surely hourly data is better than daily. So I wrote a small program to collect the information. That was just the beginning.

It’s been many months since I designed the first TwitSprout dashboard. I remember my excitement when we reached our first 100 users. It feels so long ago (but it wasn’t). Then this month we were featured by Mashable & CNN for our analysis of Obama’s Twitter Town Hall. Guy Kawasaki even tweeted us out! We were all smiles and high-fives here in the office.

Thank you (everyone) for your awesome support and inspiration.

We are always at your service :)

To your continued growth! Cheers! -Dan and the TwitSprout Team

Get in touch anytime (@dHolowack | @abh1nv | @apetresc)

A few of our favorites

And the reviews continue. Including one of our personal favorites this week:

by David @spark_pc

Compared to the other one-page report and statistic dashboards provided by the hundreds of others, TwitSprout gives you exactly what you want to see, when you want to see it. No need to wait for an e-mail or the weekly reports to come in, you click, share, and receive real-time data. That’s what you wanted in the first place right? If you’re looking for that one-stop solution and are tired of searching around on the Internet, this is for you. Just sign-up, wait for your account to activate, and BAM! You have what you want. -Dave

Unplanned Downtime

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 18:23:00 -0400

Our gnomes took an unscheduled vacation…

To our (super-awesome) TwitSprout Beta Team,

I wanted to let you know that TwitSprout experienced some unplanned downtime during Thursday July 14th and Friday July 15th.

What Happened?

Everything appeared calm on the surface, your private invite links continued to operate, dashboards were generated and our other sites remained live. However, behind the scenes, our data-gathering gnomes had gone on vacation.

in geek speak: We run our platform on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. It is a robust and scalable infrastructure, but not without its own hiccups on occasion. One of our data-hungry servers stalled, without warning. We are speaking with the Amazon team to identify a possible cause.

What Does This Mean?

This means we were not collecting data for approximately 48 hours (and as a great lover of data myself, it pains me to say this). Therefore, we are missing information for most of Thursday (July 14th) and most of Friday. As of Friday night (July 15th) we had all systems back up and running.

What To Watch For…

Hourly Change in Followers (bottom left metric): You will notice that data for Thursday July 14th and Friday July 15th are not shown in the bar graph. Friday is shown in the legend and the number included is the total change in Followers across Thursday and Friday.
Daily Tweets (bottom right metrics): Total tweets for Thursday July 14th are shown as zero on all accounts. Thursday’s tweets are included within the total for Friday July 15th.

Future Prevention

Our team has deployed data-fetching gnomes to every one of our servers. We also added something called ‘auto-scaling’ (sounds impressive right?). Basically, this means that all of our systems work together to collect data. If one of the individual systems goes down or stalls, then another one is automatically created, in its exact image, to complete the job.

Now that’s awesome gnome teamwork!

We Are So Sorry

From the whole TwitSprout team, we are really sorry. This is not cool, we get that and feel terrible. We have been successfully tracking account data hourly for many months. This was the first hiccup in our system.

If you do have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email. You can simply respond to either your welcome email or official invite we sent you. All communications come straight to my inbox - and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

This, after all, is what a beta is for. We are confident that our new (and more cooperative) gnomes will ensure this does not occur again in the future.

Dan and the TwitSprout Team

Results Are In! Obama Town Hall

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 08:18:00 -0400

As we promised, there’s now a post-mortem page on our Obama Dashboard. The full analysis was in our last blog post, but the infographic breaks it down and provides many more details — plus we just think it’s a lot of fun! Take a look at the link above, or just feast your eyes below:

Thanks again for all the support — it’s been quite a ride!

Adrian at TwitSprout

Dissecting Results from Obama's Town Hall

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 01:39:00 -0400

Without a doubt, today has been an incredibly exciting day for TwitSprout. What began with our Obama Dashboard announcement this morning has evolved into a whirlwind of activity, tweets, and blog posts. We are, of course, incredibly grateful to all of our partners, users, and fans for their help and encouragement; it’s been a thrill.

With that said, our work here is not yet done. In our last entry, we made some predictions, and now it’s time to see how we (and the White House) performed!

The Good

What did everyone get right? We feel we matched the major categories of things Obama focused on — tax cuts, the debt ceiling, and job creation — but that wasn’t very difficult to do. More specifically, we nailed the third tweet Obama answered:

Tech and knowledge industries are thriving, yet jobs discussion always centers on manufacturing. Why not be realistic about jobs?

This one was right on our dashboard, and we had singled it out because @Kim, a very high-Klout user, was one of the many who put their weight behind it. The White House chose the earliest version of the tweet, by @dmscott (with slightly lower Klout), but the logic is clear — this tweet was chosen for the high-level support it received.

Another one we expected, but for a completely different reason, was Obama’s 8th:

Mr. President, In several states we have seen people lose their collective bargaining rights. Do you have a plan to rectify this?

According to our calculations, at the time of the Town Hall, this tweet had been mentioned, retweeted, or RT’ed over 182 times — making it the 4th-most active tweet in the Jobs category, and 14th overall. This is high enough to be on our list of likely predictions, although not high enough to earn one of the few spots on the Dashboard itself. Even though the tweeter, @pmglynn, is not very influential (with only around 100 followers), the question itself generated a lot of discussion and interest. It was an excellent candidate, and both TwitSprout and Obama appear to think so.

The Bad

We definitely stand by all the predictions we made — there was solid reasoning behind each of them, and we’re confident they would have made excellent questions; however, there are a couple of predictions we didn’t make that, in hindsight, probably would have made sense.

The most obvious omission is @johnboehner’s provocative tweet:

After embarking on a record spending binge that’s left us deeper in debt, where are the jobs?

At the time of the Town Hall, this question had been propagated 79 times: a nontrivial amount, but only enough to place it in 10th place in the Jobs category, and much lower overall. There are two things that should have tipped us off about it, however:

Even though @johnboehner’s Klout is only 69, his influence on President Obama is considerably higher. His position as Speaker of the House undoubtedly played a role in Mass Relevance’s decision. Of course, there’s no automated tools that would detect this. We simply should have thought of it.
Even though the full form of the tweet had only 79 propagations, the snappier version “Where are the jobs?” by itself had 341 of them — enough to place it in 2nd place in the Jobs category, and 6th place overall, which would certainly have gotten our attention — except that this tweet didn’t make sense to us, since we didn’t see it in context with Boehner’s tweet (they were far apart in our rankings). Of course, we had algorithms to detect subtle rewordings between tweets, but these two didn’t trigger them.

The Ugly

We might as well come out and address the elephant in the room. It was obvious to anyone who had followed our predictions or paid even casual attention to the #AskObama stream, that there was one particular topic getting a particularly large share of the buzz: the legalization of marijuana. Although the topic of the Town Hall was ostensibly about the economy, it was becoming clear that people did think of this as an economic issue. By our measurements, the two most popular tweets of the entire stream, were:

Would you consider legalizing marijuana to increase revenue and save tax dollars by freeing up crowded prisons, court rooms?

Pres. Obama: Why can’t we discuss legalizing cannabis to create jobs and save millions annually on enforcement?

These two alone, including their various reincarnations, accounted together for more impressions than every question about taxation put together! An event that emphasizes popular opinion as a tool for accountability could surely not fail to address these questions in the depth they deserve; but, of course, the topic was notable only for its absence. The President discussed the war on drugs merely tangentially, for less than half a minute, leaving absolutely nobody satisfied.

One explanation for this glaring omission is a simple misinterpretation of the data, whether on our part or Twitter’s. With such a strong signal coming through the noise of #AskObama tweets, however, we were fairly confident in our evaluation of this topic’s relevance — but maybe the curators were looking at things differently. When White House correspondent Mike Allen announced the official breakdown of tweets, we wanted to compare his with ours:

Notice that the relative percentages of Twiitter’s four categories are nearly the same as ours, except that it accounts for more of the total — as if a chunk of the “Other” category was removed or reapportioned among the four categories. Here’s what happens when we separate out the tweets we believe to be related to the legalization of marijuana in our set from the catch-all “Other”:

This evidence is purely circumstantial, but it does suggest that the things our algorithms classified as marijuana legalization were either dropped from the grand total, or re-assigned to some other category based on secondary characteristics. Either possibility would result in the near-perfect correspondence between our “Top-4” and “Other” tweet percentages.

To be fair, we didn’t expect the President to truly treat every question equally. For one thing, the encouraged topics centered around job creation and the economy. For another, a large part of the “Other” chunk of the pie consisted of rude or snarky comments, clearly trying very hard to impress with their own wit. Nobody expects Obama to field those. But when an overwhelming part of the people who are supposed to be setting the tone of the discussion are being conspicuously passed over — it makes you wonder why we don’t just drop the pretense and have another press conference instead.

Despite the disappointment some people may have felt about this dodge, we still felt it was a great event. The thrill of working in “real time” under the public eye is addictive, and we’ll definitely be looking for more opportunities to practice our analytics chops out in the open. Thanks again for all the help, and keep an eye out for more great TwitSprout features coming soon to our regular users.

Adrian at TwitSprout

The Obama Dashboard -- Official Launch!

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 06:52:00 -0400

After hours of feverishly gathering, sorting, poking, and prodding all of our #AskObama data, we’ve finally got our first iteration of the Obama Dashboard!

Our gnomes had to work hard for this information — there’s no magic wand you can wave that tells you programmatically whether a particular tweet is a genuine question or just some promotional spam. It’s even harder to tell when two questions are essentially the same except for some minor rewording, and more difficult still to group together questions on the same general topics, like “jobs” or “Republicans.” With some clever heuristics and manual intervention, however, we’ve succeeded in bringing it all together into the predictions and analysis above.

As we discussed in our previous blog post about this Town Hall, it’s impossible to know how the team will curate the massive amount of questions that people all over Twitter have posed. It’s clear from the numbers above, however, that any honest evaluation of the data requires the President to acknowledge Americans’ concerns about the drug laws in their country. Whether it’s justified or not, people seem to place the blame for a lot of America’s economic woes on them and their heavy-handed enforcement. Regardless of which side of this debate his opinion happens to fall, if Obama doesn’t address this point during tomorrow’s discussion, it will be clear that he’s avoiding the data. By a landslide, this is what people want to hear his plans on.

To keep up with the latest version of this dashboard, as well as @BarackObama’s TwitSprout dashboard and our eventual postmortem of the Town Hall meeting, keep an eye on http://Obama.TwitSprout.com and, as always, send us all the feedback you can come up with!

Adrian at TwitSprout

Reporting Live: Obama's Twitter Town Hall!

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 23:30:00 -0400

The latest buzz on Twitter has been all about President Obama’s impending Town Hall tomorrow at 2 PM. As your friendly neighborhood social media experts, TwitSprout has been carefully monitoring and analyzing the tens of thousands of tweets to bring you our predictions and conclusions! [Jump to Word Cloud]

Activity

We started tracking the #AskObama hashtag shortly after the White House announced the event, on Friday, July 1st. Uptake was slow at first, but another Obama-related event on Tuesday really started the ball rolling.

We’re currently tracking over 20,000 unique tweets so far (not including retweets!) and we fully expect this number to reach 50,000 before the President begins speaking tomorrow. Of course, not all of these tweets are quality questions — many are just encouraging others to participate. Our gnomes are busy using heuristic algorithms to separate the wheat from the chaff, and as best as we can tell, the President has about 11,000 genuine, unique inquiries from concerned citizens to look forward to on Wednesday. Let’s hope he talks fast!

Of course, in all seriousness, Obama will only be able to scratch the surface of this mountain of curiosity he’s gathered. According to Twitter, the team at Mass Relevance (plus Jack Dorsey) are the ones entrusted with curating and selecting the lucky tweets. Nobody can be sure exactly what their selection process will look like, but it’s safe to say it’ll be some combination of the following:

Random selection: In true democratic fashion, all tweets are treated equal and have the same chance of being picked at random. While nobody can complain about the fairness, it might lead to some really strange results.
Sheer numbers: The best questions are being retweeted hundreds of times, and the cream is really rising to the top. The team could select the most retweeted and RT’ed tweets as the questions the most Americans care about.
Popularity contest: There are many ways of measuring influence on Twitter — whether it’s Klout, follower count, or your TwitSprout dashboard. However they choose to measure it, the questions asked by the most important people might be the lucky ones.
Politics as usual: Of course, it’s not impossible that the White House has already “vetted” a series of questions from their own talking points, and the team is simply looking for people on Twitter who asked the same things.

We obviously can’t do much to predict the outcome of #1 and #4, but we just can’t resist using our number-crunching powers to see what happens in the other cases. Right up until the event tomorrow at 2 PM, we’ll be making and updating our predictions about the most common and the most important tweets — and posting them to our special Obama Dashboard (coming soon)! Follow along to get the pulse of what Americans really want to know the most.

Topics

One thing is clear: there’s something never far from the front of Americans’ minds.

The #AskObama word cloud clearly shows what tomorrow’s talk will revolve around: Jobs, the economy, and Obama’s agenda to improve them. Even the legalization of poker and marijuana pale by comparison — and same-sex marriage didn’t even make the list! No matter how Mass Relevance decides to choose their questions, you should expect to see these big-ticket items make an appearance.

The next few hours…

The half-day remaining before President Obama takes the microphone will be an exciting one in Twitter’s history. Make sure to get your #AskObama questions in before it’s too late, keep up with this blog and our Obama Dashboard for the latest updates and predictions as the hour approaches, and tune in at 2 PM. While you are all out worrying about the country, we’ll be worrying about the analytics!

Adrian at TwitSprout

TwitSprout Dashboard on the iPad We’ve made some big...

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 20:27:00 -0400

TwitSprout Dashboard on the iPad

We’ve made some big improvements behind the scenes that enable your dashboard to load twice as fast and maintain high visual quality when zooming on mobile devices, such as the oh so sleek iPad. Check out TwitSprout on your mobile device and let us know what you think! These videos are posted to our new TwitSprout YouTube Channel - Please subscribe to keep in touch.

Lookin’ good, iPad!

Save and Print with PDF!

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:32:00 -0400

Download your One-Page Twitter Dashboard to PDF for printing and sharing! Click the link labelled ‘PDF file’ in the top-right corner of your account page when viewing the dashboard. Be sure to use the private invite link we sent via email. If you haven’t signed up yet, join our beta!

The full story…

We’re a social business, so I figure our blog posts should also tell a story. All our new features are inspired by user recommendations - from people like you. A good friend of ours, Michael Litt (founder @VYard), says “Customers are your best Product Managers,” and we take this to heart. The PDF addition was no exception, as you’ll read below.

Yesterday morning we setup the entire team on Co-Tweet. Abhi and Adrian (co-founders at TwitSprout) also love speaking directly with our awesome users. We try to include our name at the end of each tweet so you know who you’re speaking with :). I’ll post a full introduction to the team sometime soon.

Let’s dig in. At 12pm we received this tweet from @SonomaCountyWeb.

Unbeknownst to me, Adrian responded immediately, saying…

I look to Adrian and say, “Sometime today? Can we do that?”. He just smiles. We’ve learned not to underestimate Adrian’s ability to make our servers dance.

In just under 2 hours we launched the new PDF feature.

@SonomaCountryWeb responded “It worked like a charm! Thank you!!!” [tweet]

1 hour later, Will @willcuthbert, has already printed his dashboard from PDF!

Thanks Will! We agree. Lookin good! :)

It’s great to see everyone already using the PDF version of the dashboard!

You can also bring your printed dashboard to an interview! Yes, we’re serious!

That very afternoon I received the following message from Jen, one of our beta users, saying “I’ve got a pretty important job interview for my dream job tomorrow and will use TwitSprout in my long set of printouts to show them why I’d make a great Social Media Guru. You guys are the best!”

Best of luck Jen! We’re rooting for you!

We’d love to hear more stories about how you’re making use of the PDF feature. Are you taking it to a marketing meetings or a job interview? Or using the dashboard printout when speaking with clients? Let us know in the comments!

That’s all for now.

Thanks for all the support everyone! We couldn’t do this without you.

-dan at TwitSprout

Get your own TwitSprout Growth Report by Joining the Private...

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 01:14:00 -0400

Get your own TwitSprout Growth Report by Joining the Private Beta.

Growth of @garyvee during LeWeb 2010

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 08:00:00 -0400

Speaking at a global conference will certainly increase your online popularity, but how much?

Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) is author of Crush It, a #1 Best Seller, and a thought-leader in social media and brand building - with over 800,000 Twitter Followers - popularity is not an issue. Still, we were interested in how TwitSprout’s Growth Report reflected activity on Gary’s Twitter account during the conference.

Gary was on stage at LeWeb at 17h05 GMT (or 18h05 CET in Paris) on December 9th. The presentation lasted about 45 minutes. You can watch Gary Vaynerchuk’s Complete LeWeb 2010 Talk on YouTube.

Gary’s Twitter account is currently growing at an average of 6 Followers / Day (Report as of Dec 20th). During Gary’s presentation his account grow by 200 Followers in 1 Hour (Hourly Follower Activity), and by a total of 400 Followers the day of LeWeb.

This is a very significant increase considering Gary’s daily average - but is this significant for a global conference like LeWeb? Would a presenter less well-known already experience more growth?

Just thought it would be fun to share this report. Thanks - Dan @TwitSprout.

We love the feedback

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 13:00:00 -0400

We just sent out another batch of invites for the TwitSprout beta. Every few days we bring another awesome group of users on board.

We love all the feedback! We ARE listening. Your recommendations are directly driving our feature road map. Our goal is to create the most useful set of Twitter intelligence available - and we need your help. If you haven’t signed up, please use our beta link here: http://bit.ly/JoinBeta

Please continue to leave us feedback on Twitter and at: http://twitsprout.uservoice.com

This is just a small collection of the feedback we are receiving - and a big thank you to everyone on the beta. We’re sorry if your TwitSprout tweet is not featured here, we love you too!

That’s great! Thanks Nigel @nigellegg

And that’s exactly what the CSV data is intended for :) Glad to hear it! Thanks Brian @taitbw

Pure awesomeness! You’re too kind JB! We are in the early stages, which is exciting, because there is so much to come! Thanks so much. Cheers JB @JBCollinet

Precisely. We aim to deliver clear & meaningful metrics - understood by any Twitter user. How many business owners know the difference between Klout and Clout really? Thanks again Nigel@nigellegg. Awesome feedback. Cheers.

Yes. We do that! :) Cheers Branden @bkornell

We’re excited too! And Thank YOU for joining! Thanks to all of our awesome beta users! Cheers to @MapleMusic

Right on James. Keep growing! Thanks to @jsumner670

Well that’s good news! We have a few more features to include before a full launch. The official site is in the works now too - hold tight until the New Year. Rest assured, we wake up and go to sleep thinking about Twitter metrics - crazy, I know. Thanks Jonathan@jonathanmfritz

Thanks Stephen! @stephencanning

We think so! Nothing too radical yet, but we have a few cards in our hand - yet to be played! Many more features to come… Cheers Ben@BenLaMothe

Thank you everyone! And enjoy the Holiday Season!

To your continued growth! - @TwitSprout

Branded Twitter Metrics for your clients!

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Ideal for Social Media Management Services, PR Firms & Consultants

Clear performance metrics demonstrate value. This transparency builds a loyal customer base and is a key competitive differentiator.

You work hard to establish your brand and TwitSprout’s White Label service is designed to deliver a completely branded solution - directly to your clients.

We manage and track your clients data, generate the reports and deliver them directly to their inbox, via your mail server on a weekly basis. We do the technical stuff so you can focus on managing and growing your client’s accounts.

Please complete this white label request for an opportunity to join our initial offering!

TwitSprout Growth Dashboard - Beta

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:00:00 -0400

A Reference Guide to the Growth Dashboard Prototype

One page with clear metrics to answer the question… are you growing?
This is the first prototype. We’re following an early beta launch philosophy to seek input from you, our beta gurus. You’re the experts.

I have put together this reference guide to help explain the calculations and purpose behind the analytics.

1. @username

This is the Twitter account of course. Need more be said? :)

2. Refresh Date

The date the Growth Report was updated with the latest data. We plan to reload this report for you daily, but still tweaking the system. You may check this date just to be certain.

3. Current Profile Status

This information can also be found on your Twitter.com/username profile page. We jazz it up with a visual to bring some of the information into context.

4. Key Metrics (in plain English)

4a. Current Growth Rate

Is the account growing? How fast? We indicate Followers / Day.
The calculation is based on the average growth over the past 7 days. The one week range was used to ensure a weekend is included because some accounts grow more during the business week than on the weekends.
A color indicator is applied to indicate accounts gaining followers (green) and those losing followers (orange).

4b. Growth Acceleration

Sure, your account may be growing at 10 Followers / Day, but has this been declining from a 100 Follower / Day growth rate last week? The change in growth rate indicates if your growth rate is stable (0%), growth rate is increasing ( > 0%) or decreasing ( < 0%). The metric is colored to indicate increasing (green) and decreasing (orange) rates.
The Growth Acceleration is currently calculated over a 4 week period. A percentage is determined by comparing weeks 2, 3 & 4 with account growth over the previous week.

4c. Follower Ratio

The notion of popularity on Twitter is often measured as a ratio of the total accounts you are following (Friends) compared to the number of people following you (Followers). In many cases (but not all) it is important to maintain a Follower Ratio greater than 100%, otherwise you may be perceived as a Twitter spam bot (shouting at people on Twitter - “Get a Free iPAD!”). I hate that.

4d. Listed Ratio

Today many people use 3rd party tools (@Hootsuite, @TweetDeck, @Seesmic) to monitor their Friends’ tweets on Twitter. These tools provide streams to monitor Twitter lists (categories of tweets). Accounts with hundreds (or thousands) of friends often use lists to keep everything organized. Other people can follow these lists as well. Therefore, more lists, more influence.
Listed ratio may also have a relationship with your Klout score. Check it out.
Article: “Analyzing Twitter Lists-Follower Ratio As An Indicator of Influence”
http://bit.ly/ListRatioInfluence

It’s difficult to set a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ threshold for the Listed Ratio. For now this metric is a consistent grey color.

Question: Would you like to see Klout score in the Growth Report?

5. Historical Account Growth

All is revealed in this chart. The peaks, valleys, rise and fall. Following (orange) and Follower (blue) totals align with the left axis and Listed totals (green) with the right axis.
The graph is calculated and displayed over a period of 30 days.
Our tracking systems run at a high frequency. This graph uses a continuous timeline and the dates are simply provided as a guide.

Question: Do you have recommendations to improve the design of this graph?

6. Hourly Follower Activity

The past 7 days of follower activity, by the hour! Days are indicated by color and the total daily followers gained/lost displayed within the legend.
Hours are set to the GMT (+0000) timezone. This metric is packed with information.

7. Daily Tweets

A simple metric to visualize your tweet-activity over the past 7 days.

We look forward to your feedback! The developers are playing foosball right now, give them something to work on :)

Please use the blog comments below for general feedback and our UserVoice account (http://twitsprout.uservoice.com) to contribute new feature ideas, modifications & any bug issues found.

Thank you for the interest and support.

To your continued Twitter growth!
Dan @TwitSprout

Join our Private Beta

Welcome to the blog!

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:41:00 -0400

We love analytics. And we love social media.

This blog will catalogue development of the TwitSprout analytics.
We’re tracking several accounts already in the Private Beta program. Please complete this form in you’re interest in joining the beta.

Much more to come.

Cheers,
Dan @TwitSprout