How many tweets does it take to be a trending topic on Twitter?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:18:03 +0000

Trending topic on Twitter

While not completely convinced of the value of a trending topic on twitter, besides an ego boost, its nevertheless a very question that we get asked by a lot of customers. It is usually asked in one of two ways:

“How many tweets does it take in a given time period to be a trending topic on twitter?” or

“How many people have to talk about this on twitter to make this topic appear as a top one on Twitter Search?”

First some quick facts and numbers so we can baseline over the last 7 days:

1. The average number of tweets per day is 1.9 Million

2. The average number of unique twitter users per day is about 631,737

3. The average number of unique twitter users online per hour is 48,233

4. The average number of unique tweets per hour is 83,394 and unique tweets / minute is ~ 1350

5. Number of unique trending topics per day is ~8900 (these are for one specific day, but average over the last 7 days is in this range). Trending topic has a “shelf life” of 11 minutes, most though are less than 5 minutes. N.B. There are 10 top trending topics shown on Search.Twitter.com at any time.

Unique Twitter users and tweets by hour

The million $ question of how many tweets it takes to trend depends on 2 things - # of people tweeting at the same time on topic and the hour of the day.

What other factors matter?

1. How many followers in total exist for the people online at that time? This will make it easier for that topic to be distributed quicker and hence trend faster on twitter

2. Nature of the topic – Breaking news, politics and technology related topics do very well on Twitter. We ignored inane (in our words) topics like Good night, tired etc.

3. Location of twitter users – this is a nature of time, but most twitter users are in coastal United States, Japan. If you wish to trend a topic on Twitter, during the timezone they are most active, you are better off talking about topics that interest them.

Assuming Pacific Standard Time, our research indicates:

Between 12 (midnight) to 6 am PDT: approximately 1200 tweets and about 500 users to be trending

Between 6 am to 12 Noon PDT: 1700 tweets and about 733 users

Between 12 noon to 6 pm: 1500 tweets and about 812 users (this may be because there are more people during this time but they tweet a lot less)

Between 6 pm to 12 midnight: 1900 tweets and about 922 users

Some points to note: These numbers will vary by nature of topic, date and appeal of topic worldwide. This gives you a rough estimate or a ballpark, but is not in anyway comprehensive.

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Business or Personal: How to manage your corporate Twitter profile

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:45:08 +0000

Its a well understood maxim that technology companies are the “early adopters” of most things new in technology. Used to be financial services and telecommunications were the flag bearers, but if you were developing any kind of software the first companies you’d go and knock on the door of were in New York or Silicon Valley. I started to analyze twitter in this same regard. Who were the early adopters of Twitter from a corporate perspective (ignoring individual users for this discussion) and why were they adopting twitter.

SocialBrandIndex is one such directory of companies on twitter. So is Twellow. There are several uses of twitter from a corporate perspective. The biggest number (431) of companies that have a “presence” on twitter are media companies – this includes online media, newspapers, large blog networks and TV networks & movie studios. We track about 1900 companies (of which I think about 800 are fake or “hijacked” accounts on twitter.

The question I started out to answer was since twitter is such a social (as in people are needed to be social) site -

“Is it better for an individual to represent a company than for a company to have its profile as a iconed entity?”

What that means is that is would you rather have your questions answered by Mahalo OR by Jason? Its hard to disassociate a prominent individual from a company from the brand. At the same time, Lionel as your point person for all DELL is better than any DELL support is it not?

One of the main drivers for companies to adopt social media I think is to ensure that they show up as a company with real people instead of a faceless organization or “corporation”. Should they have not learned from the several bypass IVR cheat sheets on the web that customers want to talk to a real person?

What do you think? Would your rather follow someone that’s a real person or Comcast Cares even if you know there’s someone there to help?

Buzzgain » Business use of Twitter

How many tweets does it take to be a trending topic on Twitter?

Business or Personal: How to manage your corporate Twitter profile