Ever thought about using Twitter for doing surveys? Here are some thoughts...

[Colin Graham]

I recently conducted an experiment using Twitter, which I have blogged about in greater depth.  I just wanted to share my observations and thoughts about what you may need to consider if you want to do something similar...

OBSERVATIONS

As a data-collection activity, I felt it was reasonably successful.  For future experiments to be successful using Twitter, I think:

• a more specialized hashtag would be better.
• instructions should be in a tweet about 120-characters long to reduce chances of re-editing.
• a longer time period could/should be applied with RTing at timed intervals to allow for global participation.
• anyone who ‘hijacks’ the instructions should be contacted and asked to RT original as far as possible.
• Google Reader did not retrieve all of the Tweets sent during the experiment, so it is best to have two or three archives available for analysis.
• graphs and data charts provided by archive software will also contain extraneous ‘noise’, if people ask questions or discuss the activity using the hashtag.
• any archive will probably need to be edited before analysis.

So, over to you now… let me know if you want me to take part in your data-collection activity!  The more complete discussion can be found in my blog entry on "The #mathgeek experiment"!

http://colintgraham.com/2010/08/31/the-mathgeek-experiment/