#SaveWarriorNun Commentary on #WarriorNun Twitter Measurement

Hi, my name is Christopher Penn. I run the Substack newsletter for the Save Warrior Nun campaign, along with all the data and charts in it. My day job, I am the chief data scientist at TrustIsights.ai, and I do a lot of work with uh marketing analytics and marketing data. There have been a few questions lately about tweet counts. So let's address those questions.

First, how do companies, uh the various tools, get Twitter data? There are two fundamental ways. First, you get data from Twitter itself via their GNIP API, the name of the application programming interface. GNIP is sold to enterprise software companies. It is reassuringly expensive on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per month paid by each company to Twitter.

In exchange, these enterprise software companies get almost unlimited access to Twitter's databases and near real-time snapshots of the data as Twitter has it. The second way is to collect data via Twitter's regular API. This is far more cost effective, but it comes with some trade-offs. First, when you collect data from the regular API, you have to you have to collect it at a very high frequency and you have to store that data yourself. When I first started working on the campaign, I set up my own server and had it collect data from the Twitter API every five minutes.

Even with that advanced setup, it only collected about 55% of the tweets available, especially during peak times, because the API only returns a certain number of results at a time. And let's face it, we can crank out a lot of tweets. This means that if you use the non-enterprise API, you sometimes have to go back later and try and find the missing data, fill in the gaps, and sometimes that results in tweets being counted twice or more than twice. In the campaign, you'll hear about two major tools being used. This newsletter uses data from a company called TalkWalker, TalkWalker.com, which in turn uses the GNIP Enterprise API.

As a result, each day, when I send out the newsletter, I'm getting a live look at the Save Warrior None hashtag as it stands, present and past, which means that if a tweet is deleted or an account is suspended or deleted, those tweets also disappear from the accounts, as they should. They no longer exist. Because TalkWalker uses the Enterprise API, it is most in sync with what Twitter itself sees. The second tool you'll hear a lot about is a company called TweetBinder. This is a small software company based in Spain.

Uh yeah, Spain, Madrid, I think. Uh, and I believe, because I don't know, I have never talked to anyone who works there, they use the second method to gather their data. Folks using it for the Save Warrior None campaign have to do a lot of manual work, hard work to manage TweetBinder data, recording their observations in spreadsheets, etc. This is a lot of manual work, and because it's manual work, it introduces a lot of potential for inaccuracies above and beyond the potential inaccuracies in TweetBinder's data itself, which can be potentially substantial, especially for you know lots and lots of tweets. So the question is which is the better measure of the campaign.

Now, again, I do stuff like this for my day job. If Save Warrior None were a paying client, I would advise them to use the TalkWalker data because it's the most accurate. However, a paying client would also be probably using the data in more ways than just keeping track of the overall campaign. So there would be higher levels of risk for inaccurate data. Because Save Warrior None isn't a paying client, it isn't a centralized organization, it's not a company, and isn't doing anything with the data other than measuring the general progress of the campaign, the risk to the campaign of inaccurate data is relatively low.

Would it be nice if all the tools, all the software, and all the people working hard to keep track of the data were in agreement as to what the totals were for any given period of time? Sure. But the risk of substantial harm if the totals are not in agreement, it's pretty low, right? Nothing bad happens. If one person says it's X number of tweets, another person says it's Y number of tweets, and a third person says it's Z number of tweets.

Nothing, nothing bad happens. A streaming service isn't going to make the decision to renew our show solely based on the number of tweets we generate, right? So the key takeaway is that directionally, all the folks contributing their efforts to measuring the campaign volunteering, uh, are measuring in the same general direction. Up. Right?

When it comes to expending energy and effort for measurement, we should be focused on creating more tweets and more social media content on every channel that will have us. That's where our energy and effort is needed most to ensure the folks that uh are at places like Netflix or Apple TV or Hulu and whatever, let them know we're not going away. So if you have other questions about measurement and metrics and data quality, feel free to hit the reply button in the Substack newsletter. Uh, happy to answer those questions or just tweet and use the hashtags and stuff to the Substack campaign Twitter address. Happy to answer those questions as you have them.

But let's focus on what really matters, which is continuing to be really loud. Thanks for watching