The talk of the past week has been Apple’s launch of the iPad at a special event in San Francisco. Apple’s launches typically attract an extreme amount of attention, and now that Twitter has become a mature, mass-use tool we decided to do an analysis of local reactions to the launch.
Twitter analysis is all the rage at the moment, but the analysis that we most often see is pretty basic. One of the best is this analysis from the NYTimes Research Labs: Monitoring Twitter’s iPad Commentary. But while the presentation of their results is fantastic, there is more to social media analysis than counting keywords in Twitter. Or, as Annie Pettit of Conversition put it last week from the podium at the MRIA Net Gain 4.0 conference (and later tweeted), “Counting is not analysis“.
Counting is certainly part of analysis, but what we most often see passing as “social media analysis” is just the first step. While there is some value to counting tweets, it’s much more important to analyze the concepts contained throughout all of the tweets in a dataset, whether those words represent likely keywords or not. It’s only using more advanced methodologies that can we get a complete view of a conversation.
To demonstrate this, Nexalogy Environics’ Guido Vieira performed a Twitter study of the 24 hours of discussion following the launch of the iPad in the Montreal area. As you can see, the results are very interesting. Read to the end of the PDF – this analysis suggests a very important methodological issue to pay attention to related to Twitter analysis.
Download the PDF [500kb]: NexalogyEnvironics-iPadLaunchAnalysis1
