Twitter Survey: Results
A few weeks ago I run a survey in and about Twitter (together with Stuart). Now it is time to present a summary of the results. We are going to contribute the results in detail combined with a PLS analysis to one of the major IS conferences in 2009. We want to thank all our participants!
The survey lasted 13 days and had nearly 140 participants. After clearing up the data (i.e. spelling errors in the Twitter user names) we had 131 data sets. The following figure shows the origins of the participants (information from the QuestionPro logs, data visualization using Swivel):
The majority of participants has a very good opinion on Twitter (1..”Strongly Disagree” till 7..”Strongly Agree”):
The answers to all the other questions concerning confirmation, perceived usefullness and satisfaction were very similar to the figure above. Questions about the intention to use Twitter in future showed a slightly shift. This might be a result of downtime and reliability issues (i.e. archive accessibility) as well as of powerfull competitors (not only other microblogging tools but status updates in Facebook as well as activity streams like Friendfeed).
The most interesting results were indeed the answers to the critical mass questions. There is no clear average opionion as the participants split into two halfs: one group says they have many friends on Twitter while the other group says they have not. There is a clear correlation between a person’s network size (friends as well as followers) and her/his attitude to the critical mass questions. You can see the result for “Many people I communicate with use Twitter” here:
The implication of this finding is that although people say there are not many people on Twitter they communicate with it still can be usefull and they want continue using it. This means that there must be other valueable usages beside communication: networking or just reading updates of others (maybe strangers).
It will be announced here once the full survey paper is available. I look forward hearing your comments and thoughts.
Tags: microblogging, twitsurvey, twitter
November 24th, 2008 at 08:46
Hi Martin,
thanks for sharing your results. I’m going to write my masterthesis about blogging (which includes microblogging in that case) in educational contexts. SO if you’ve got any hints for me I’d be glad.
Greetings from Hamburg,
Ralf
November 24th, 2008 at 08:55
Hi Ralf
Thanks for your comment. Check out my bookmarks and publications tagged with “microblogging”: http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/boehr/microblogging.
There is also a paper about microblogging in education from http://twitter.com/mebner. Also interesting in this area is http://twitter.com/barbaranixon.
In my opionion it is very important to devide different use cases of microblogs (internal communication tool in teams or lecture audience, public tool for knowledge sharing, following important/relevant people from a special area for learning purposes et cetera). They use the same tool name “microblogging” but in fact have different characteristics.
All the best
Martin
November 28th, 2008 at 10:09
Thx for sharing!