Graphing Total Daily Tweets
Last year I started tracking the total number of tweets posted to Twitter every day. I wrote a Ruby script that uses the Twitter API to post a new tweet to a private Twitter account and log the ID number of that tweet. That script runs once a day at the same time every day. Tweet IDs appear to be auto-incrementing integers, so we can track the total number of tweets posted in the past 24 hours by subtracting today's tweet ID from the previous one. Another Ruby script processes the log file so I can feed it to Excel to produce pretty graphs.
I started the script in April 2008 and promptly forgot about it before checking out the results today.
This graph shows the number of tweets posted each day for most of the last year. I had to smooth the data in a couple of places when Twitter was down... in those cases I just extrapolated between the closest two points.
A few quick takeaways:
- As noted by others, Twitter is busier on weekdays than on weekends
- Notice the traffic surge during the November 2008 elections
- Notice the decrease over the 2008 Christmas holidays
The Social Media MacGuffin: A Volume-based Business Model for Twitter said,
March 27, 2009 @ 5:08 am
[...] real value is in the volume. Millions of people make around 6 million tweets per day, by one count, turning Twitter into a world-wide, real time twitching, tweeting sensing system. If you want to [...]
Joseph said,
April 2, 2009 @ 3:33 am
Could you give me the script? I really dislike tweetstats that use bar graphs and give me too little information. Your idea sounds wonderful. and respond by email if you wish.. i recommend that.
–Joey
adam said,
April 2, 2009 @ 7:58 am
Joseph - The script doesn’t produce the graph, just the log file, which gets imported into Excel to produce the graph. And it only saves the current tweet_id number so we can calculate how many total tweets were posted that day. It won’t give you any personalized stats like TweetStats will. I’d be happy to share the script — it just doesn’t do much.
Adam
Gewitter auf Twitter – es „buzzt“ in den Connunities und regent „Tweets“ | GlobalCom PR-Blog said,
July 15, 2009 @ 6:33 am
[...] in aller Welt erobert. Täglich veröffentlichen die über drei Millionen Nutzer bis zu sechsmillionen 140-Zeichen Nachrichten – „Tweets“. Viel schwieriger als selbst zu twittern ist es für die Nutzer Interessantes von [...]