Today the Oxford University Press (OUP) or for the purposes of this post, the department of stating the bleeding obvious, has finally confirmed what some of us have suspected for some time, in that Twitter is indeed all about you. This follows on from a Harvard Business Review report earlier in the year that claimed only that there’s a lot of dead space in the Twittersphere with roughly 80% of tweeple being followed by just one person and that 10% of Twitter users account for 90% of all tweets.
The OUP leading headline is that, in common with spoken English, ‘the’ is the most used word on Twitter, but the second most popular is ‘I’, whereas it normally only just breaks into the top ten. Though to be a fair comparison, the OUP should have provided a list of the most popular words used in answer to the question, ‘What are you doing?’. Of course not every tweet is actually a direct answer to that question, but it does tend to guide what sort of content you tweet forth on. The Harvard report also doesn’t reveal anything too mind blowing, there’s a rough rule of thumb when it comes to the activity in online communities. For every one super-user who produces content, ten will interact with that content by replying commenting and 100 will lurk. So for ten percent to produce 90 percent of the content is pretty good, although the figure may well be skewed by including retweets and auto-tweeting of blog posts. It is also an excellent number in comparison to Wikipedia where over half of all edits are made by just two and half percent of all users.
The other twit-bits revealed by the OUP are really no less stunning, revealing such insights as:
- Average words per tweet = 14.98
Average sentences per tweet = 1.40
Average words per sentence in Twitter= 10.69
Average words per sentence in general usage = 22.09
All without making any reference to the 140 character restriction once or pondering how it might, possibly, have a dramatic effect on the number of words and sentence length then used in this medium. Apparently verbs in their gerund form are also more common and terms such as “Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating” are all in the top 100 first words, again revealing that people are using Twitter to broadcast what they are are doing.
Finally the research of almost 1.5 million tweets reveals that there is ‘evidence of greater informality than in general English’. OK is used more and there is more swearing, which is the one finding that did interest us. As while, according to Cursebird, the PN digi team variously swears like a drunk sailor, a gansta rapper and an enthusiastic porn star on Twitter, our language tends to be a little fruiter in the real world.
So having roundly criticised this research, what would have we liked to have seen instead from the OUP? A greater comparison of how Twitter language compares to Facebook, which is admittedly tricky to do, or text content. How, or indeed, if, Twitter users are hastening the evolution of language, what new words have been conceived and are already passing into mainstream usage? From a non-language view point it would be great to gain a better understanding of what drives people to Twitter and why they stop, what they expect from it and if any business, other than Dell, has made money from the channel?
Facebook, research, Twitter