Social Networks for Mining: Twitter Case Part II

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 16-17, 2009

Social Networks for Mining: Twitter Case Part II

Initial research shows that business use (at least on the mining side) is very limited and is in its infancy. Big business so far does not understand what is it and keep distant. Indeed, when you try to search ‘mining’ with twefellow.com you get 230 returns, however, most of them are associated with data mining; and only around 70 are real miners. I have made a simple research and here are the results. On Page 2 I summarized the most active miners-users; I have a list of members that relate themselves to providers of ‘mining news’ (only 12 of ALL Twitter users). And I have a shot summary for the most prominent Twitter-miners. Note that on each profile page I have stats on three top words used in their posts.

On Page 2 of presentation I have summarized the most active mining companies and individuals as of June 15, 2009. What is clear – that most of them started using Twitter a few months ago, and they are not very active with postings. Interesting to note the trend that 5 of 12 of the most active users represent global companies, mostly information providers. Big market players are here: Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals, but they are rather timid in activities.

Summarizing this initial research we may point to the following:

1) Mining companies practically are not using Twitter for any purpose

2) The most active are international information providers

3) Twitter-miners do not use hashtags in the right way – that means that information, provided by them is not segmented

About this I shall talk about in my further posts, alongside with discussion of my Twitter trial and some suggestions for monetizing.

The scope of the trial was to test options for usage of Twitter in mining industry. I made the following assumptions:

1) My posts shall be limited to current news: I am following about 90 different mining news sources

2) I would not participate in any discussions

3) To test user reaction with a couple of polls

4) Try to segment news stories according the their contents

So, here is a bit of stats (as of June 17):

Time frame: May 17 – June 17

Comparison with the most active miners:

This shows that I found myself among the leading Twitter mining professionals and with the time going on I may attract more attention.

Hashtags in Twitter are very good to categorize and segment all entries. This is a very good tool to search for relevant information. I used a limited number of major hashtags:

#global_mining – everything associated with mining – 1,673

#mining – general news – 853

#mining_finance – everything related to M&A, financing, mining stocks, etc. – 691

Twitter is very good to follow the news, so I introduced #Mining_Quakes – new hashtag for events that shake the mining community. However, no-one beside me used it.

Remembering that Twitter is mostly used by ‘young adults’ I had no illusions that they would endure following mining news. However, strange as it is – I managed to have 199 followers. Of course about 1/3 of them have no relation to mining, but I consider this as a good result.

In a while I got some RT (re-Tweets) by users, including by Yahoo News.

I noticed earlier that my effort with polls was abortive – very few people answered – that shows a tendency in Twitter – WATCH.

So, basically, that sums the trial experiment – in my next post I want to make some suggestions as to how I see development of Twitter for various industries and attaining some monetizing.