30 Minutes of Social Media Noise

This video (sped up) is what my mind absorbed in real time within a span of 30 minutes. It’s just half an hour of captured morning Twitter activity.

Following a little over 300 social media sites, IT orgs, outsourcing companies, friends, and family on Twitter seems like a lot to keep up with, but the actual volume of information that comes from these follows doesn’t hit home until you crunch a few numbers. So I decided to do just that: crunch what my brain tried to process every morning of what I now call Social Media Noise.

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Believe it or not, that’s nothing compared to what some other brains digest for Twitter breakfast. I’ve seen accounts follow over a thousand people and more. Of course, some of them are mere auto-follow accounts, but can you imagine what their screen would look like every morning?

“Averages” Don’t Help The Situation

Here are a few interesting stats.

• The average American adult reads 180 words on a monitor per minute. (Source: Ziefle, M. (1998), Effects of display resolution on visual performance, Human Factors, 40(4), 555–568.)
• According to The Ayman and Naaman Show, the bulk of tweets are around 40 characters long.
• If the average word length is six characters per word (five letters plus a space), the average tweet is about 6 words plus a link of some sort.

At this rate, we should be able to process an average 30 tweets a minute, or 2 tweets per second.

Twitter is Different

It should be noted that processing a tweet is different from processing a group of 6 non-interactive, still words on paper or screen.

These activities surely slow down the processing, but by how much?

Processing a tweet — that is, a moving message that drops down from its original position on the page, and is replaced with a new one — could involve favoriting a tweet, retweeting, responding, direct messaging a tweeter, or clicking a tweet’s link just to process even more information.

3.9 Minutes Could Kill 109 Tweets

According to ReadWriteWeb, 29% of tweets produce a reaction (a reply or a retweet). When you tack on 2 seconds for each retweet and 9 seconds per reply at a rate of typing 40 words per minute, 1 minute of interactive, processed Twitter usage (30 tweets – 29%) is delayed by 1.6 minutes (8.7 reactionary tweets * 11 seconds). Within those 1.6 minutes, 40 new tweets could go unnoticed*.

Mashable claims that people click through only 2.8% tweets. Here, I assume the click-throughs lead to an average 500 word blog post of some sort. When people click through to an average of .84 blog posts within 1 minute (30 tweets – 2.8%), and actually read them, they spend 2.3 minutes to digest these blog posts. In the mean time, anywhere from 69 new tweets could go unnoticed*!

You’d Have To Follow 10,000 People

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Of course, *to miss that many tweets, you’d have to follow a lot of people. And by a lot, I mean thousands or more. HubSpot suggests the average person tweets 4.422 messages a day. That’s 0.18 tweets an hour, or 0.003 tweets a minute. To reach 30 tweets a minute, which Mr. Ziefle suggests we can process, you’d have to follow 10,000 people (30 minutes / .003 minutes).

I think I’ll remain satisfied with the 300 people I currently follow. I can’t even keep up with that small number as it is!

How About You?

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How many people do you follow on Twitter? How many tweets go unnoticed? Or more importantly, what’s the probability that your own tweets will go unnoticed? If you or your followers follow a large number of people, there’s a high chance that important messages aren’t getting through. Check it out:

How’s it look? Are you or your followers following an inefficient number of people, and therefore, basically ignoring a significant amount of incoming data? If the answer is heck yeah, I dunno, or I could be, you might want to reduce the number of people you follow.

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External Resources:

1. A Twitter Year: 365 Days in 140 Characters
2. Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less
3. How Blogs and Twitter Are Transforming Popular Culture