Pinnacle Insights
Mapping the rise of Twitter
June 30, 2010 | Written by Duncan Hart
How do you judge the popularity of something and the degree to which it has penetrated a nation’s psyche? I often use the following benchmarks: number and regularity of appearances in the mainstream media; whether it has become the subject of study by apparently credible academics and whether it has developed its own glossary of unique words and phrases.
Twitter has met all three of these, with a newspaper report today revealing the ‘Twitterscape’ of London – a map with contours corresponding to the density of Twitter posts – or ‘tweets’. On the map, mountains represent the busiest areas with valleys showing where the fewest tweets originate. The map was created by a ’Tweetographer’ from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, who has undertaken similar studies in New York.
What this does show is the degree to which Twitter has taken hold, with Londoners posting 430 tweets a minute on average compared to 670 per minute in NY. This research should dispel any doubts we may have about the growing influence of social media tools such as Twitter – a tool that all PR people should have in their toolbox if they are to successfully reach and engage young people, especially those in our major cities.
