Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If you follow more than a handle of accounts, your Twitter stream can quickly become a firehose of irrelevant information. Because of this, many veteran users never visit their stream. Instead, they create lists or run saved searches.

Here are a few other options to help you filter your Twitter stream for more useful, relevant, information....

...The lack of consistent correspondence between Twitter reaction and public opinion is partly a reflection of the fact that those who get news on Twitter – and particularly those who tweet news – are very different demographically from the public.

The overall reach of Twitter is modest. In the Pew Research Center’s 2012 biennial news consumption survey, just 13% of adults said they ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages; only 3% said they regularly or sometimes tweet or retweet news or news headlines on Twitter.

Twitter users are not representative of the public. Most notably, Twitter users are considerably younger than the general public and more likely to be Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party. In the 2012 news consumption survey, half (50%) of adults who said they posted news on Twitter were younger than 30, compared with 23% of all adults. And 57% of those who posted news on Twitter were either Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared with 46% of the general public. (Another recent Pew Research Center survey provides even more detail on who uses Twitter and other social media.)...

What factors influence whether or not a tweet is perceived as credible? According to this recent study, users have “difficulty discerning truthfulness based on con-tent alone, with message topic, user name, and user image all impacting judg-ments of tweets and authors to varying degrees regardless of the actual truth-fulness of the item.”

For example, “Features associated with low credibility perceptions were the use of non-standard grammar and punctuation, not replacing the default account image, or using a cartoon or avatar as an account image. Following a large number of users was also associated with lower author credibility, especially when unbalanced in comparison to follower count [...].” As for features enhan-cing a tweet’s credibility, these included “author influence (as measured by follower, retweet, and  mention counts), topical expertise (as established through a Twitter homepage bio, history of on-topic tweeting, pages outside of Twitter, or having a location relevant to the topic of the tweet), and reputation (whether an author is someone a user follows, has heard of, or who has an official Twitter account verification seal). Content related features viewed as credibility-enhancing were containing a URL leading to a high-quality site, and the existence of other tweets conveying similar information.”...

When a group of teenagers says Facebook "confuses and scares" them and makes their eyes hurt, there may be a problem. Though Facebook is still considered the most popular social network among teens, their enthusiasm seems to be waning.

Some of them blame it on the ads and the games, but they also say it's become too popular with their parents.A recent Pew Research Center report found that 77 percent of online teens are still on Facebook compared with 24 percent on Twitter, but the latter number is up 16 percent since 2011....

Brands use Twitter for many reasons – the social network is one of the fastest growing online services around, it reaches prospects in real-time and while on the go and it serves highly engaged consumers, too. However, searching for past Tweets can be difficult as Twitter limits how far members can scroll back. Well, it used to impose a limit.

In a recent blog post, Twitter’s Paul Burstein announced that with new updates to the network’s Android, iOS and mobile web apps, a few additional edits were made to its services. The company has developed a way to include older Tweets in on-site searches, so members can navigate farther back than ever before to view important and relevant media. Want to check out that highly effective Tweet that generated responses from thousands of followers last June? Twitter now makes it easy....