Twitter can give some pretty decent feedback on a number of things, including how a certain group of people feel about a given topic or event. More recently we’ve seen the real-time update industry battling it out for attention given during specific events like President Obama’s inauguration, with Facebook and Twitter pining for more user activity. So it’s no small wonder to see that marketing agencies are looking to Twitter as a bell weather for public opinion.
The 24 hours surrounding the Oscar’s Academy Awards ceremony gave NMS ample opportunity to see what Twitter users think about the event itself, as well as various films, actors and actresses. A blog entry from NMS today outlines what it saw as the most popular Oscar-related topics on Twitter last night–Slumdog Millionaire and Sean Penn. NMS attributes the activity to the number of nominations Slumdog Millionaire received, and the political nature of Sean Penn’s acceptance speech.
Those are certainly two areas of discussion that would garner a great deal of activity on a microblogging community such as Twitter. We already know that Twitter is a great way to empower citizen journalism and offer an online shared experience that achieves a happy medium between chat rooms and other forms of communication (formal blogs and comment threads, phone calls, email, etc.). But what can the Academy or a company like NMS do with this shared experience?
So far, NMS is becoming a part of the shared experience and surrounding discussions. And learning a lot all the while. With Twitter having only a small percentage of the users that Facebook has, however, what can we really learn from Twitter? Can Twitter really be used as an actual bell weather to determine the opinion of the general public, and does massive traffic on Facebook’s live updates mean anything when it can’t be tracked in the same way tweets can?
These are certainly issues to think about, especially as Facebook and Twitter seem to be competing on a more direct basis in recent weeks. Both companies stand to offer a lot in terms of their revenue-generating potential when it comes to working with brands and agencies for demographics data related to such marketing research. So I’ll be interested in seeing how both Facebook and Twitter take their next steps in this regard.
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Again, thanks for looking below the surface and for linking to our report -- I am sending your post around to the New Media Strategies team as we speak :-)
All the best ~ L.
Leslie A. Bradshaw
Communications Manager
www.newmediastrategies.net
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