Twitter is sort of notorious for being a big pot of complaints with a few compliments and the odd non sequitur. But after Facebook’s big IPO on Friday, perhaps folks will look a bit more closely at the way Twitter can be used to gauge audience reception as a whole. The fine people over at DataSift recorded nearly 100,000 interactions on Twitter and found that the ebb of conversation seemed to indicate where Facebook’s stock would soon be going.
To be entirely accurate, they — over the course of six hours — retrieved exactly 95,019 interactions from 58,665 authors. That’s enough to form some kind of consensus about the data without assuming too terribly much. What they discovered was that once the opinion of the Twitter users turned, the price of Facebook’s stock did so shortly afterwards.
The sentiment turns negative on Twitter and 25 minutes later, Facebook’s stock drops significantly. Things turn more positive and the stock rebounds eight minutes later. At the end of the day, public opinion went far more sour on Twitter and 10 minutes later this was mirrored by another drop. It may not sound like there’s much of a correlation, but DataSift data represented as a graph makes it a bit clearer.
The implications here are that Twitter might be a good provider of public opinion in a pinch. If the response from a majority of users is one thing, chances are that this is reflected elsewhere. It might also just mean that those interested in an initial public offering of a social media company might use another form of social media as well.
(DataSift via TechCrunch, image credit via Scott Beale)
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Published: May 20, 2012 11:00 am