Lots of people have opinions about Twitter, ranging from a complete waste of time to the indispensable connector with your community.
(If you don’t know what Twitter is, this video by Lee Lefever will explain it all.)
I’m firmly in the latter camp. Since I signed up on Twitter in December 2006, it’s increasingly become the primary place online where I share thoughts and opinions with other people who matter to me.
Indeed, Twitter is my online social network. Not Facebook nor any of the professional networks I belong to. It’s Twitter.
I didn’t realize how much I’ve become tuned in to Twitter until I saw some stats from TweetStats that analyzed my complete Twitter history and shows me what’s happening on Twitter for me in relation to my community.
TweetStats produces easy-to-understand graphs like the one above showing how many tweets I’ve done each month. Other stats show information such as how many direct messages I get and from whom, and what applications I use to tweet.
It certainly gives you far more depth to the basic stats you see in your Twitter profile, like mine here.
Very useful to have this depth of analysis from TweetStats as it lets you see your twittering from so many different aspects.
One useful TweetStats stat is one that shows you the times of day when you Twitter most.
In my case, it’s in the morning as this graph indicates. That’s not a surprise although I find it interesting to see the other times I’ve been twittering.
In the late afternoon and early evenings, for instance: that’s in my time zone (UK), so I know it’s mostly tweets with friends, etc, in North America primarily.
Whatever you think about Twitter, at least you have a pretty good stats application to analyze what you’re doing.
If you want to see all my TweetStats stats, feel free – it’s open information.
And think about this from a business communication point of view where you have the ability to drill into your exchanges with colleagues, clients and others in your business circle.
It all adds to understanding more about how and when (although not why) you interact with other people online.
Incidentally, how did I learn about TweetStats? Via Jeremiah Owyang. In a tweet, of course.
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Neville, I agree, I spend more time on Twitter than Facebook to dowload Twhirl. Have you tried it?
http://www.twhirl.org/
I discovered Twhirl only a month or so ago. But it’s now my primary Twitter tool on the desktop.
I think the best one for mobile, btw, is Twibble.
It’s on my list of jobs to do.
I’m now beginning to feel guilty about not following more people on Twitter. I haven’t actively been searching people out. Scoble wrote a really interesting post about it a couple of weeks ago, I follow him because I like to keep up with his geeky views on new technology.