What are people twittering about? I’ve been studying sample tweets, looking for clues about how people use Twitter. One thing that’s clear is that lots of people use Twitter to share. All the numbers in this note are based on a sample of around 675,000 tweets, from early June of this year.
Approximately 20% of the tweets contain URLs. That is, one out of 5 says “Look at this! I want to share this with you!” So, what are they sharing? Figuring that out takes a little more work.
Most of those URLs (over 2/3) are shortened by services like bit.ly or tinyurl.com, with bit.ly (over half) the leader. If you start with a URL like http://www.scoutlabs.com/blog/ bit.ly will shorten it to http://bit.ly/OHe48.
That may not look like a big difference, until you remember that tweets are limited to 140 characters.
You might not know you’re using a URL shortener — a Twitter application may do this for you. Paste the shortened URL into your browser (or sometimes just click on it) and your browser will get the original URL from bit.ly and use that to fetch the web page. Or, you can simply ask bit.ly for the original URL. That’s what I did.
Of the URLs shortened by bit.ly, approximately 8% were links to YouTube. Others in the top 10 included blogspot.com, google.com (including Google Maps, Google News and Picasa, along with feedproxy), wordpress.com, nytimes.com, etsy.com, facebook.com, and flickr.com. The results for URLs shortened by tinyurl.com were similar, but they included fewer links to YouTube and Flickr, more links to craigslist.org and job sites.
Some sharing sites automatically generate short URLs — they don’t need bit.ly or tinyurl.com. Over 1 in 20 links in my sample were to twitpic.com, a site devoted to sharing photos via Twitter. About a quarter as many were to blip.fm, a music sharing site. There are a number of smaller sites dedicated to sharing maps, music, photos and video via Twitter.
Given the new integration between Flickr and Twitter I suspect that if I repeated my analysis with newer data, I would see significantly more links to Flickr.
So, what have I learned?
- People use Twitter to share textual content such as blog posts and news articles.
- People also use Twitter to share non-text content such as maps, music, photos and video.
- The links in tweets are a good indication of what people are interested in— right now!
- Because so many URLs are shortened (using bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.) it’s essential to look up original URLs to discover what they’re tweeting about.
I’d be interested in hearing comments and questions, along with any insights you may have about how people are using Twitter.
Image “Tweeties” by Chris Wallace. Licensed under a CC 3.0 License.
Interesting Twitter useage stats. Thanks. 2/3 of links shortened by url shorteners like bit.ly and tinyurl reveals many aren’t posting directly to twitter.com but via 3rd party software like tweetdeck, twhirl, via iphone, etc. Wonder if the percentage of tweets containing urls will increase as spammers flood twitter, or if twitter growth of “real users” who post lots of url-less daily goings-on posts will outpace junk url posts?