Using Twitter

I tweet as @FCMunkey. I wouldn't expect you to already follow me as I tend to use Twitter to read what's going on in the world rather than participating in the general discussion of the day.

When I do tweet I like to tweet about things that I find interesting. I tend to just re-tweet a lot of stuff, though.

I used IFTTT to log my Twitter use over the course of a 24 month period from the beginning of April 2015. Each tweet was added to a row on a Google Sheet with the time and date. Here's what I found.

What am I tweeting?

Mainly other people's stuff, it appears.

Over the study period I tweeted 1,544 times, or about 2 times per day.

• 59% of those tweets (915) were re-tweets. In other words nearly three-fifths of what I shared with the world from my Twitter account was someone else's thoughts
• 22% of my tweets (347) were @replies to other users and a further 1% (22) were public .@replies

I can therefore only claim to have tweeted original thoughts and content 260 times, or 17% of the time. That's quite miserable when you think about it.

247 of my tweets (16%) included a hashtag of sorts, of which 66 were original tweets (4% of the total). That's not really a sign of someone contributing to the trending topics, is it?

When am I tweeting?

When I should be doing other things.

Each time stamp was recorded and the hour in 24hr format was logged for each tweet. The hourly totals over the full 24 months are plotted below.

I get up for work at 6:30am so I shouldn't be tweeting much in the early hours. However, during the first hour of the 24hr day (00:00 to 00:59) I tweeted 102 times. The question is am I using Twitter when I can't sleep or am I unable to go to sleep because of Twitter?

I tweeted 6 times between 01:00 and 05:59, including a re-tweet of someone else's joke at 04:15 one Monday morning when I had work the next day. Why?

I re-tweeted someone else's joke at a later date at 05:59 on a Saturday morning, and on that particular day I had a bad cold. Wake up, blow nose, re-tweet, attempt to go back to sleep.

There's a noticeable drop around lunchtime, which is when you'd expect more tweeting than in the mornings or the afternoons. My Twitter breaks coincide with my work breaks, and I don't like to think what that says about my work ethic.

How's my language?

My mother wouldn't be proud.

I scanned the tweets for the F-word, C-word and S-word. My language can be colourful so that's not an exhaustive list of my regular profanities.

• F-words cropped up only 49 times, but 29 of which (59%) were entirely my own
• It got worse with C-words when both of the 2 occasions were of my own doing
• S-words were used 24 times, 50% of which were mine

What am I tweeting about?

That's a story for another day...when I've analysed the data more.

Thanks for reading!