Why twitter statistics cannot be trusted
Posted on July 22, 2009 by Mo Elzubeir in Opinion
The National is carrying a story on how twitter is yet to lure the Middle East. In his piece, Tom Gara (@tomgara) claims that Twitter will never make it in the Middle East due to a number of reasons, mostly social and cultural.
The debate has started from a clever press release by Spot On PR, which offered some statistics on the usage of Twitter in the MENA region. The figures are depressing, to say the least. However, I don’t trust those figures, at all.
Spot On’s Carrington Malin was kind enough to share the report with me and even point out that others may have arrived at different numbers. There is a reason why that is the case. Twitter has been, from the very beginning, ultra-protective of its users and information on them.
I spent some time poking around Twitter’s API to see how I can harvest similar types of statistics but to no avail. The only way to do this is to actually follow all users in the region. Finding who they are is an almost impossible task unless you work for Twitter.
So, how did Spot On arrive at their figures? Well, they say they have done it manually as the numbers are small. Do we really know that they are?
Based on questionable (but otherwise applaudable effort) figures, Tom Gara concluded that the Middle East is just not going to embrace twitter the same way it did not embrace blogging. He cites issues like “protecting the family name” as one.
Here is my problem with Tom’s op-ed. Blogging and twitter may share the same concept in that, anyone can publish anything to the world. The difference is, blogging requires a lot more stamina and dedication. All you need to tweet is a mobile phone (well, one that gets you online).
What has happened in Iran has highlighted how incredibly easy it is to use it. The issue is not that culturally the Middle East is not suited for “social personas” as Tom tweeted back to me. The issue is that we don’t have anything to say. Yet. There needs to be a catalyst for quick adoption (as in Iran). However, I do expect gradual adoption to continue nevertheless.
At the end of the day, regardless of our ethnic and cultural heritage, we are all social beings. We scream for attention. Some of us go on to become professional attention-seekers while others end up behind closed doors. Twitter offers us an opportunity, 140 characters a time, to get that attention. You don’t have to be clever. You don’t even have to be able to spell. Just random thoughts will do.
With a background in business computing, Mo Elzubeir is the CEO and founder of Mediastow, one of the fastest growing media intelligence agencies in the Middle East and North Africa region.
Thanks for the mention! And you’re right, Twitter-stats are far from an exact science (and not helped by Twitter making changes to APIs over the past few months that change the way third party apps access Twitter’s data).
Spot On has been tracking Twitter adoption in the Middle East since last year purely to try to identify trends, and the exciting thing about the past few months is that the growth rate has shot up compared with last year and Q1 ’09, which is consistent with Twitter’s global statistics. From our point of view, whether a particular country has 500 or 600 users is perhaps not crucial at this stage.
On the question of scale of adoption in the MENA, our honest opinion is that adoption of the Twitter platform is currently in line with our statistics. Other than by counting overall users, if you a) regularly check the noise level by using Twitter search for searching tweets by location and b) check out who the region’s Twitter power-users are following and being followed by, it’s possible to get a feel for Twitter user levels.
Carrington