Viral Tweet Survey Preview: Blogging About Tweets

May 15th 2009 View Comments




Some time ago, I started a survey about viral Twitter usage. I gathered a bunch of responses and then got crazy busy with some cool projects and speaking gigs. Over last weekend I finally got the data pulled into a database and started analyzing it. Here’s a sneak peek of what I think is one of the most interesting and useful data points in my results.

Some users blog about ideas and links they first saw on Twitter and for marketers this represents a huge opportunity for traffic generation, buzz building and link development. The first piece of data to look at is how often people action blog about tweets:

Then I looked at what type of content average users blog about from Twitter as well as what types of content “frequent twitter-to-bloggers” blog about. I defined frequent as once a week or more and 21.57% of my data set fell into that category.


One interesting this from this second data point is that frequent twitter-to-bloggers love blogging about entertainment news they saw on Twitter, any theories why?

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  • http://whatisnoise.com David Fisher

    How do you feel about surveying vs direct observation/scraping for results?

    It seems that surveys generally produce too few results and are too self selecting. What have you experiences been with this?

  • http://bable.cybermarshall.com David

    Dan,
    People probably blog about entertainment because they spend $$$ on it and are interested in it. Entertainment blogging may take less research and certainly has a gossip aspect to it. We know people like to gossip :-)

  • http://danzarrella.com Dan Zarrella

    @david I do try to do direct observation where possible since I agree it often produces larger/better result sets, like in the case of retweet data. But there is also something to be said about asking about motivational data (why someone did something) and asking about things that are nearly impossible to observe (like blogging about tweets).

  • http://www.JustAChange.com Deb B.

    Hi Dan, to me your statistics make perfect sense. If you have been blogging for quite some time and you want to remain current, one of the easiest ways, from my perspective, to remain part of the conversation is to blog about celebs and Hollywood. These topics still sell, and I’m guessing always will:).

  • http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk Mat

    People blog about whats interesting to them, and i guess the entertainment industry fills that requirement for a lot of people.

  • http://www.ellenissen.com elle

    I think people pull ideas from Twitter to blog about. Usually the ones that are most exciting to them stem from entertainment- the whole ashton/cnn thing is just one prime example. Sometimes people grab onto some controversy or new concept as well. I get a lot of my ideas from the conversations that I start on Twitter and then expand it into a blog post. I think people just like fresh/new/hot topics, and social media delivers that on a silver platter for people to eat up.

  • http://www.groovytastic.com/vs/ Davin – The Viral Sanctuary

    I’m relatively new to watching your blog Dan. I must say each time I visit I completely enjoy how you analyze and gage results so much. You definitely do take a very scientific approach!

    Cheers
    Davin

  • http://www.presslancer.com Edison Samuel

    Yeah you have mentioned excellent points and very helpful graph.

  • http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk SEODr

    Interesting post. It just shows the huge Twitter explosion over the past year or so. The real time aspect of Twitter just makes it the place to go for new, fresh ideas.

  • http://vkontakte.com/ Mike

    Hi, nice posts there :-) thank’s for the interesting information

  • http://bashfoo.org Mike McDermott

    Dan, I read this title and then the body of this article and still am left scratching my head…

    Is it not a human natural propensity to first develop a complete thought from front to back and then regurgitate that idea in brevity and with variation?

    These graphs go counter the way I do business.. I write an insightful (sometimes spelled inciteful) blog posting and then tweet about it in order to gain counterpoint and initiate further dialogue both on Twitter and within the blog comments section.

    Working from Twitter back to Blog post also eliminates any level of subject matter credibility. Just ask all those idiot celebrities about how they feel about people “impersonating” them on Twitter. I bet folks don’t try to impersonate them on a blog.
    Working from blog out to microblog and bookmark sites are the only way to have a “point of reference”.

    Move along, these are not the droids you are looking for….