Sydney tweeters “do it on the company dollar”
A study of half a million tweets from Sydneysiders suggests that compared to other countries, workers are using Twitter to send more personal tweets in work time and using it less in their own time.
A total of 491,000 tweets originating from Sydney over the space of a week were examined by advertising agency The Works, and compared to London, New York, Munich and Paris. According to The Works:
“Sydneysiders like to tweet on company time. When compared with other international cities, Sydney’s tweeting habits are quite different. Sydneysiders tweet far more during work hours (weekdays 9-5pm) than other cities and tweet less at home in the evening. The study looked at tweets sent (rather than received), and showed that the vast majority of them were for personal use.”
Douglas Nicol, Partner at The Works said: “Australians are addicted to social media – spending more hours per week on social media platforms than any other Westernised country but yet we only starting to understand the changes it means for marketing.
“Our research on Twitter usage is a plea to marketers to stop using social media as a marketing fashion accessory and invest in understanding the facts about social media in Australia and really look at the opportunities in a no bullshit way.”
The agency, which estimates there are 455,000 Twitter accounts in NSW, has also created a map of Sydney usage with “mountains” showing peak usage. Peak suburbs for tweeting include St Leonards, Bass Hill and Toongabbie.
The Works also points the finger at ad agency stafffor potentially being the most prolific worktime tweeters: “It appears that outer western suburbs of Sydney and St Leonards (the home of many advertising agencies) are the two faces of Twitter usage in Sydney”
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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An unusual study but interesting to know we’re all slackers! 😉
I’d be keen to find out how The Works classified what was a private/professional tweet? This area is increasingly difficult to distinguish between as the boundaries between personal and professional life become increasingly blurred.
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It’d be equally interesting to see the amount of work-related tweets after hours, too.
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I say that because generally I tweet about private affairs while I’m at work, and when I get home I’ll occasionally follow up work matters, link my work, et cetera. I find that personal tweets during work hours break the monotony, and work tweets in personal time get more interest from followers.
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Nice work The Works. A clever study to get PR attention, and adds a dose of interesting information to the world.
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Only been fired for tweeting during work hours once so far..
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Hmm… I have worked in both the areas with high usage in the last little while… Coincidence? Maybe not 🙂
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Hrmm, isn’t that dependent on people setting an accurate location?
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No!! Really??
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In terms of the issue of professional versus personal tweeting in the workplace, a recent US study from 360i showed that only 2% of tweets were professional – would be good to know if that is true for Australia…
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Sales collateral nothing more.
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We’ve tracked Australian twitter users over the last 7 months or so, I actually did a graph of this a couple of days back which supports the finding that Australians tweet more on Week Days at least (we didn’t go down to minutes, just to day). Might do an analysis by time of day and see.
Anyway, it’s about a 20% drop from weekday to weekend in Tweeting behaviour for Australian users nationally. http://blog.tribalytic.com/tra.....-7-months/
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While part of me wants to respond, “Well, der” I will instead follow up Franksting’s question:
How did The Works pull it’s location data? Was it based on the location given by in the account information or rather the optional Geolocational data you can attach to each tweet
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Waiting for some business council to claim that Twitter cost the country $X billion dollars and X-million hours in lost productivity (y’know, as if we could suddenly turn all those slices of Twittertime into 100% productive time, in which ever spare second was spent working to max capacity).
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ok, i admit i do tweet a bit during office hours…
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I can’t help but notice the huge peak over the Haymarket area. Did you just simply use raw data to make your assumptions?
The Haymarket area has 2 universities, 1 VERY large TAFE, and a major transport interchange (bus and train – and who doesn’t gripe about those on Twitter).
Haymarket also has a load of high density apartment blocks favoured by students. The St Leonards area also has this type of high-density apartment dwellings. How many students do you know “work regular hours”?
If your assumptions about people using Twitter “on work time” were correct, you would expect to see the peak at the northern end of the CBD, not the southern fringe.
You simply _have_ to take into account the main activity in each area, and the sort of people drawn to those areas. And some sort of population density weighting on the raw data is essential if you are make assumpations about comparing actual usage.
Also, what is the map actually depicting? You have no legend.
I’m waiting to see which lazy media outlet picks up and runs with this flawed, but admittedly very interesting, study.
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Didn’t mean to sound so sniffy.
But then The Works made some really flawed assumptions, and it’d suck if workers got bashed in the meeja because of these.
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It’s been a great publicity stunt for The Works though.
As well as this piece, there’s a huge item in the Daily Telegraph today.
I hope they’re as good at making ads as they are at PR.
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without PR there would be no news or charitable donations
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I would argue that, whether the tweet content read as ‘personal’ or not, many people Tweeting during work hours are indeed building up their Twitter profile and knowledge of this community / network / tool and ‘keeping up with things’ as part of an overall professional motivation. All work and no play / personal makes for a less interesting Tweeter.
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