Twitter Research

Once again, a Fast Company article, "New Twitter Research: Happy Tweeting Could Win Business," shares the research that Twitter users tend to aggregate themselves not only by common demographics such as age, race, and educational background but on psychographics as simple as the tendency to be a happy tweeter or sad tweeter. The study investigated tweet streams from 102,000 Twitter users for a six month period, which adds up to about 129 million tweets, applying language analysis software to pick up on tendencies towards negative or positive language and topics.

Fast Company speculates that maybe the PR tweeters for businesses should try to attune themselves to their followers and follow up with either promoting happy, upbeat tweets or more neutral, factual ones or perhaps even snarky, sarcastic tweets. As seems to be a perpetual discovery regarding communications research, knowing your audience and consumers, how they want to be communicated to and treated, is infinitely important.