Fun with #Fevola @BrendanFevola05
In a recent e-mail conversation with some one, we were discussing measuring attitudes based on #hashtag usage versus @following. There are good reasons to measure one or another and each tells you something different. The context of the discussion was something like: What’s worse? Some one following @teenagedgirlwhopublishednudepictures OR someone tweeting #dickileaks? Both seem relatively bad but the audience following @teenagedgirlwhopublishednudepictures was bigger and thus in my mind more important. Also, not all #dickileaks tweets are negative as they pertain to St Kilda. I promised I would at some point see what the overlap was.
Turns out I can get that from what I already have using a simple Excel statement. And as I’m almost tired of the St Kilda controversy, I decided to look at Brendan Fevola first. Back when he last did something stupid in September 2010, I started archiving all tweets that used the #fevola tag on Twapperkeeper. When I collected them about 10 minutes ago, there were 757 tweets. I took the list of people who tweeted, removed all the duplicates and found that those tweets were made by 565 Twitter users. I compared this to my list of Brendan Fevola followers as of December 28, 2010 which had 6,370 followers. Total crossover? 118. Perspective: 20.885% of all the people who tweeted #fevola followed him. 1.8524% of all his followers made a tweet containing #fevola.
Conclusion based on this tiny sample? Just because you follow some one and are interested in what they say doesn’t mean that you will tweet about them. Just because you’re interested enough in a topic to tweet about it doesn’t mean you will follow a person.
