#SXSW Case Study

SXSW is an interactive and music event organized every

year in Austin. This year ObjectiveMarketer decided to

tap into the users twitter streams around the #SXSW

event. ObjectiveMarketer also created an interactive

portal at http://bestofsxsw.com for user interaction such

as view trending topics, retweets and recently posted

images. The users could also retweet/share from the

interface.

This report is focused on some of the findings from the

data thus collected, and analyzed.

What twitter #tag reveal about your social campaigns?

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Key Findings

"The fact that anyone listens to what you have to say is a big deal" via @garyvee #sxsw

Activity

Most tweets were from the users with friend/followers

count at around 10,000.

Virality

Users with higher number of twitter followers get more

retweets. However if the friends count is less than the

followers count, it effects the retweets negatively.

Retweets are not effected by how long back the twitter

account was created.

Content

Tweets with Images or rich media received fewer

retweets

Longer tweets were more likely to be retweeted.

Optimal length is anything above 80-90 characters.

Campaign Planning

The most active time for tweeting in the conference was

from noon to evening

However, Retweets were not as spread out as the tweets,

most of the retweets were only happening in the noon

Audience

There were a broad set of people in SXSW, with very

different background and interest. There were some

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interesting co-relation between users bio, and

retweetability.

Males outnumbered females by 2:1 ratio

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"In 2009 more data was generated by individuals than the entire history of mankind through 2008. " #sxsw

The data was collected for the period of 14th March to

22nd March using twitter-streaming APIs. The search

was looking for #SXSW tag in the tweets. Twitter #tags

are increasingly used by brands/organizations to run

contests/campaigns. The report highlights the

importance of analyzing the participants in the #tag

campaign, and based of that actively modifying the

campaign to meet the goals.

There were approximately 45k unique participants in

the SXSW conversations, creating more than 200k

unique tweets. These tweets were self identified tweets

(appended with #sxsw). There were other

conversations around sxsw that were not identifiable

directly (no hashtag used), and these were not

captured by this study.

Method

(continued)

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SXSW is a focused high-energy event. Most people

attending the event are both cutting with respect to the

technology and aggressive with goals, and therefore it is

expected that the crowd will have a lot of twitter users.

In SXSW the Involvement was high, with an average of 4-5

unique tweets created by each user around #SXSW.

Followers

Most active twitter users were with follower base of around 10,000.

Note, we have normalized for the population distribution. So what we see is that users with 10,000 followers are 5 times more likely to participate in the event twitter stream than users with 100,000 followers.

Friends

The most active twitter users were with friend count of about 10,000. But there is not much difference in activity level for users with higher or lower follower counts. However there is a cutoff of 100 friends, anyone with less than 100 friends there was negligible activity.

Takeway

If you are recruiting users for a campaign, ignore users with less than 100 friends.

The involvement was high with an average of 4-5 tweets created

per user.

Involvement

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Status

The users who were actively tweeting in sxsw were people

who had tweets in the range of 1000 – 100,000. The

activity level of the users with fewer tweets was high, but it

was sprodaic. In most likely case they were either self-

promoting, or tweeting around specific event.

Takeway

It is not always necessary that people who are heavy

twitter users will be the most active twitterers for your

campaign. Through the campaign keep an eye on the

trends, and based of that fine tune your strategy.

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Twitter engagement and

effectiveness of the

content and conversation

can be measured

effectively by number of

retweets generated. More

number of retweets

generally indicates a

highly engaged

audience.

Understanding your key

influencers, and

motivating them to share

your messages should be

integral part of the

campaign design. Tools

like ObjectiveMarketer

help you find your

influencer around

keywords, topics #tags.

Most Retweeted Users

These were the 25 most

retweeted users:

Twitter Handle Total

Retweets

anywhere 1036

ev 730

sxsw 601

clear_events 301

garyvee 266

mashable 248

SXSWPartyList 233

InvisiblePeople 220

twitter 182

ScrewYouSXSW 178

jeffjarvis 163

brainpicker 156

omarg 127

hardlynormal 125

PerezHilton 122

aplusk 116

jeffpulver 115

AmericanApparel

113

SXSWFreeNOMS 112

blackjoelewis 106

foursquare 105

dspark 103

LAWeekly 103

chrisbrogan 102

Twitter is not a social network. Its an

information network that helps people with

sharing & discovery (@ev at #SXSW)

Retweets

Retweets seems to be strongly co-related to number of

followers. Higher followership did not guarantee higher

retweets, but higher retweets required higher number of

followers.

Retweets-Followers

Follower – Friend Ratio

Follower to Friend ratio matters for retweetability. The

tweet is less likely to get retweets if the user had lower

number of followers than the friends.

Interestingly, if the friends count are higher than followers

count, the retweets is not entirely zero. There are some

retweets. This can be attributed to the

fact that genuinely interesting posts will

get retweets irrespective of the person

who tweeted it first.

However the number of retweets are

significantly more when the

follower/friend ration is >= 1.

Discoverability is a big problem in

twitter, and therefore it always helps to

have more number of followers.

"There are 2 kinds if people on Twitter. Those who want more followers & those who lie." @guykawasaki #sxsw

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Image - Retweets

The tweets with image links in them received lower

retweets than the tweets without the image links. The

retweets for tweets without image was close to 31.6%, vs.

when there was image it was only 16.8%.

The result can be explained because most of the images

shared were of personal in nature, e.g. snaps from events,

and these were less likely shareable compared to general

tweet about the sessions or sxsw.

Also unlike Facebook in twitter image or rich media is not

directly available for interaction, the user needs to click

out of the twitter to go to some external site. This therefore

can be hindrance to retweet goals.

Takeway

Embedding multimedia content, such as image may not

be as effective on twitter as it is on Facebook. Plan for

how it may or may not affect your retweet goals, if you

are sharing images.

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Images All

Retweets

Total

Tweets with images are less likely to be

shared.

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Tweet Length - Retweets

Tweets are shared more, if the length of

the tweet is more than 80 characters.

a. Tweets smaller than length 20 are almost never

retweeted. Makes sense, as 20 characters are

hardly 3-4 words (not worthy of retweets)

b. Tweets with length 20-80 are sparingly retweeted;

notice how the curve has dropped significantly for

that range.

c. 80+ characters have pretty good chance of getting

re-tweeted.

d. Interesting the retweets do not drop after 120

characters. Tweets with length more than 120

characters do not leave room for retweet text. But

seems like it does not hurt the retweets. We however

recommend keeping the length of text less than 120

characters, as it helps in keeping meaning of the

tweet intact after retweet.

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Most Active Time

Most tweets happening between

12:30PM – 3:00PM

SXSW is a party event, with lot of late night events, but

seemingly most tweet activities were around usual

working time of 10 AM – 3PM with the peak happening

around 12:30 – 1 PM.

Retweets followed tweets by about 30min to 1hr.

Interestingly retweets did not happen all through the

day, most retweets happened around 1PM, and it

dropped more drastically compared to the drop in

number of tweets.

People were tweeting more towards evening then in

morning. Most of the SXSW crowd was sleeping during

12 AM- 5AM.

Takeway

Tweets/Retweets can have different activity peaks. For

a successful campaign understand and plan around

the peak activity.

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User Profile

Common terms involving the users

participating in the SXSW conversation

Social Media, pop culture, Creative Director, Real

Estate, Public Relations, User Experience, graphic

designer, Web Developer, Hip Hop, Community

Manager

There were about 186 real estate agents, or people

with interest in real estate, and there were about 250 PR

folks. It is interesting how diverse the group was at SXSW,

from social media, graphic designers all the way to real

estate folks.

Most Common words that occurs on the

description

social, marketing, digital, director, designer, writer.

Design, technology, business, blogger, creative,

entrepreneur, student, manager, founder, developer,

people, husband

Again notice how varied the group is – from blogger,

writer, creative to business, founder, developer.

Occurrence of “husband” term prompted us to look if

there is some trend for male/female demography. We

found that Total number of users with “Father” or

“Husband” in their bio was more than 2k. whereas the

number of users with “Mother” or “Wife” in their bio was

only 1k. So the men exceeded women by 2:1 ratio.

Cross-pollinate learning from #tag

twitter campaigns to other digital

marketing efforts such as SEO.

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What about the people, who got

retweeted, is there something about their

description that is different?

These are the most common words found in the

description of folks who got retweeted –

Social, marketing, twitter, blogger, digital, anywhere,

people, director, editor, technology, founder, co-

founder, design, writer, community, online, strategist,

author, creative

The people who dropped out of the first list are

business, entrepreneur, student, developer, husband.

These are the people who were likely to be creating a

lot of content, but not retweeted. It seems like always

pushing messages is not the best way to get retweeted.

The folks who were not in the first list but made into the

retweets list are – strategist, author, editor, co-founder,

anywhere. They created less content, but got

retweeted more often.

Where did the SXSW participant come

from?

Central Time (US & Canada)

Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Mountain Time (US & Canada)

London Alaska Amsterdam Hawaii Brasilia

You can use twitter audience profile to

find the geo-demographics of

your user base.

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User Profile

URL Linked to the Profiles

Almost equal numbers of people were linking to either

of the social network profiles. However, significantly

more numbers of people were linking to some sort of

blog.1

Takeaway

Knowing where the users reside on different social

networks, you can fine tune your other social media

campaigns to reach the user base.

Very small % of people, (0.6%) were linking using short

URL bit.ly to track clicks on the referenced URL.

Do users with older accounts get more

retweets?

Facebook

Linkedin

Myspace

Blogs

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Red is the age of the users who were retweeted, green

is age of all the users. There is no shift in the distribution,

so it can be safely assumed it does not matter how long

you have been active on twitter for retweets.

There is a peak of retweeted users for very old joiners.

These probably are the social media celebrities who

also happen to join very early, but for more general

users it did not matter how long back they created the

twitter account.

Length of Description

Average length of the bio is 77 characters. It is really

small, and maybe guided with general briefness on

twitter.

People do not seem to be writing long bios on twitter,

with a high % of blank bios.

People like to write long tweets.

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Protected Users

There were only 450 users who had protected their

tweets.

Verified Users

There were only 120 verified accounts (less than 0.2% of

total participants.)

Average Tweet Length

Average length of the tweets: 102 characters.

There is tendency towards writing longer messages,

notice the sharp rise of the curve at the right corner.

"Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy" danah boyd #SXSW #sxswsa

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There were 437 unique twitter clients being used, of

which only 30 had ‘twitter’ in their name

Top 15 Twitter Clients Used

Twitter Client Updates

web 35571

TweetDeck 33553

Tweetie 19700

Echofon 8102

API 7450

UberTwitter 7426

HootSuite 7118

Seesmic 5247

Twitterrific 4221

txt 2706

mobile web 2602

twitterfeed 2412

twidroid 2042

foursquare 1326

TwitPic 1118

A lot of the updates were happening from mobile devices, but Tweetdeck/web were still accounting for majority of the updates.

Twitter Clients

No Client

Clients

19% of the users were not using any clients.

Technical Data

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ObjectiveMarketer is a social media marketing firm based out of Redwood City, CA. Agencies and business user use ObjectiveMarketer’s social media management suite to execute campaigns on social channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. ObjectiveMarketer provides strong analytical platform that helps clients not only execute but also identify, understand and interact with the influencers/amplifiers on these social channels.

Additionally ObjectiveMarketer provides custom solution for creating data based landing pages for twitter streams around events or keywords e.g. http://bestofsxsw.com. This report is one of the reports that ObjectiveMarketer can provide their clients to help understand the demography, and behavioral profile of the twitter users engaging with the brands on Twitter.

If you want to similar report for your business, or want to get help with campaign or social media use strategies please email us at info@objectivemarketer.com.

Twitter provides great opportunity to learn

about your target market.

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