…everyone’s got one and they all stink. Or is it opinions? I get them confused seeing how interrelated having a twitter account and broadcasting your opinion can be.
Professor Klein considers Twitter to be the new word-of-mouth when it comes to spreading the news, but if you’re going to spread news, then sooner or later you’re going to spread your opinions of the news.
A quick trend search for “Christine O’Donnell” on Twitter is enough to see that many people use the social networking site as an outlet for their political views. Here’s just a few that came up (I omitted all Twitter account names for confidentiality):
- “After finally watching Christine O’Donnell speak, I don’t understand what people see in her. She comes across like an idiot.”
- “HEY DELAWARE!!! Coons wants to RAISE YOUR PROPERTY TAXES 25%!!! STOP him by casting YOUR vote 4 CHRISTINEO”DONNELL!!!”
- “This person is wrong, and an idiot. “Christine O’Donnell can win: http://gop2112.com/archives/217?ghghg=iiifif“
- “Christine O’Donnell, Sarah Palin, Lisa Murkowski – icebergs to the GOP’s Titanic? I can almost hear the tear in the hull. I like it. A lot.”
- “You have to give ‘CHRISTINE O’DONNELL‘ a lot of credit. She is talking about the issues. PET COON DOG is side-stepping the issues!”
If you look at the statistics, you see just how hugh opinions are on twitter.
According to GigaTweet, a website that is constantly counting the amount of tweets on Twitter, there are now over 25 billion tweets.
Now, if you go to Hubspot Blog, you can see an amazing 100+ Twitter statistics that they compiled in June. Way down their list, they give a pie chart for the most frequent types of tweets.
If you take the 6% from the “Politics, sports, current events” category (which most likely contains political and social opinions), and take that out of the current 25 billion tweets, you get that 1.5 billion opinionated tweets over 106 million twitter users, as of June.
However, it will still be a while for anyone to be able to accurately use Twitter to study public opinion, according to SmartBlog on Social Media.
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