Twitter Investigation

Hypothesis:

Organisations use influential power via twitter to build interest in their site.

Methodology:

• Select every 10^th tweet from the organisations twitter feed.
• Selection of 16 tweets
• One organisation

Analysis:

Personal Pronouns = 4 times = Once every 4 tweets average

“We” – 75% = referring to the organisation, non-inclusive of the audience

“Your” – 25% =referring to the reader, non-inclusive of the organisation

Personal pronouns were featured but more infrequent than anticipated only appearing every 4 tweets on average. Further, only ¼ of the personal pronouns used refer to the reader whereas ¾ of the personal pronouns refer to the organisation but are non-inclusive of the reader. In a bigger sample the use of “we” may include the reader and the organisation but this wasn’t the case in my sample.

Hashtags = 15 times = Once every tweet average

Hashtags are largely more common throughout the sample as they serve to draw the reader from their timeline. Unlike pronouns, hashtags appear every tweet on average, but this average may be unreliable as the range of hashtags used in tweets in the sample ranged from 0 to 3. The relatively high number of hashtags can largely be attributed to the formulaic layout of the organisations tweets, which usually begin with a hashtag to set the topic of the tweet.

Conclusion:

The hypothesis was accurate to an extent as the sample of tweets contained a large amount of techniques that exercised influential power, mostly through the use of hashtags or personal pronouns. In a larger sample from multiple organisations this may not be the case as different organisations may find different methods of exercising influential power to be as effective in building support for their website/good/service.