Should I tweet at all?

This is not a rhetorical question.

I was doing some random data analysis today. I downloaded an archive of all my tweets, and of all my blog posts, and was looking at some simple statistics. I won’t bore you with a lot of the mundane details.

One thing that I must mention is that the hypothesis that twitter activity has an adverse impact on my blogging is disproved. I was looking at the number of words I’ve put on twitter each week and the number of words I’ve blogged in the same week. The two are uncorrelated.

 

In any case, so far I’ve tweeted 60,716 tweets over the course of eleven and a half years. My tweets include at total of 992453 words. Ignoring other handles, links and punctuation, maybe we can round this down to 950000. In other words, in nine and a half years I’ve tweeted nine and a half hundred thousand words.

Or that on twitter alone I write a hundred thousand words a year. 

The content of my book was about 52,000 words (IIRC). In other words, I write enough content for two books EACH YEAR on twitter. In 2013, I tweeted nearly four books worth of content.

That, however, is not the only reason why I wonder if I should tweet at all. While I’ve discovered a lot of interesting people, and made interesting connections, and can “semi-keep-in-touch” with people through twitter, I’m not really sure about the “impact” of my tweets.

I thought I’ll look at the tweets that have been most retweeted.

full_text Date retweet_count favorite_count Link
Why does the government / ruling party put out tweets with basic arithmetic errors? ?14.98+?9.02 is ?24 not ?27.44 https://t.co/oFaBNDYgpc 2017-09-19 350 416 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/910122027306164229
Remember that Richter scale is logarithmic. Base 10 if I’m not wrong. So 7.7 is 10 times as bad as 6.7 2015-04-25 171 40 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/591858524147175425
Our @uber driver tonight was one Mr Akmal. He dropped us successfully. 2017-12-24 148 312 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/944964502071623681
The greatest Hindi movie about Rajputs is Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na 2017-11-24 142 299 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/934173502281801730
Based on interim data, in 17 states NOTA has got more votes than AAP. #MintElections #MeaninglessComparisons http://t.co/LxZvtNme1P 2014-05-16 134 19 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/467242247965007872
A whopping 332 out of 542 constituencies in the just-concluded General Elections saw a two-way contest. Another 184 saw three-way contests.

In contrast, in the 2014 elections only 169 two-way contests, 278 three-cornered contests and 90 four-cornered contests

2019-05-24 95 174 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1131912762357981184
“these dark days” is a euphemism for “people I didn’t vote for have formed the government” 2019-12-19 69 242 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1207659817579335681
I have built this app that recommends single malt whiskies based on what you already like.

https://t.co/B4PqxjUQI2

Details here: https://t.co/kc3yG1mx2o

2018-11-02 56 202 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1058347106438705153
Amazing number of commies on this list RT @suar4sure: “@BookLuster: Which dictator killed the most People? http://t.co/WlJDLAiMAn” 2014-07-23 44 13 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/491876757176188928
If BJP hadn’t split, numbers would have been: Cong: 91, BJP: 86, JDS: 35 @gkjohn 2013-05-08 39 3 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/332065593660407810
Today @moneycontrolcom / @CNNnews18 have unleashed a monstrosity of a map. The map explains nothing, and nothing can explain the map!

https://t.co/VOooy26Ra2

2019-02-21 36 80 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1098577156198805504
Stud thread https://t.co/gvuZIjV71I 2018-07-22 34 105 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1021130139290226688
there’s one piece of @ShashiTharoor ‘s writing that I’ve read multiple times – his blurb for my book. When I first read it, I was amazed at how precisely it communicated the idea of my book – much better than I’d ever managed to do. https://t.co/Lz2I9ZwW0L 2017-12-14 33 138 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/941357298840059904
Did you know the cube root law of assembly size?

It’s a heuristic that states that the optimal size of a national assembly is the cube root of the population

2019-12-13 27 80 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1205408450810798080
Great piece by Dheeraj Sanghi on the expulsion of students from IIT Roorkee: http://t.co/uxPduX680z 2015-07-12 27 11 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/620138692762415104
did the Chinese workers use One Belt to beat up the police, and then escape on One Road? https://t.co/7lldCWrpxq 2018-04-05 26 98 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/981886501456924672
I don’t know why people don’t get that a non-zero number that ends in zero is even.

This is absolutely bizarre https://t.co/fpZQB24l0a

2015-12-07 26 13 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/673831614581899264
the one thing AAP has succeeded in doing is to tremendously increase my respect for LokSatta and @JP_LOKSATTA http://t.co/8hjA5l8IKN 2014-05-14 25 16 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/466432370296762368
Coffee truck at avenue road. By coffee board voluntarily retired employees association. Brilliant coffee. Ten bucks. http://t.co/rBOgRh1F2l 2013-07-11 24 6 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/355201588505223170
And I present you the way the parliamentary constituencies in Bangalore are demarcated

https://t.co/1tcGCimdG9 https://t.co/8QPIOzajN4

2019-03-26 24 59 https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1110574864803323905

Till date, I’ve had FIVE tweets with more than a hundred retweets. I’ve had ELEVEN tweets with more than a hundred likes (including one where I’ve simply said “stud thread” and then linked to a thread written by someone else).

In other words, while I might have four thousand odd followers, the amplification of my tweets is rather minimal.

So maybe I should not tweet at all? And instead devote the time and effort spent in tweeting to other means? Maybe write another book instead?

What do you think?

2 thoughts on “Should I tweet at all?”

  1. Words written on twitter vs words in blogpost may not be a fair comparison. Two reasons:

    Time spent reading tweets, checking twitter to see if there are more tweets, or even thinking about checking twitter to see if there are more tweets. This time isn’t included in the measure of ‘words tweeted’. From my experience, this total time is much larger than the time spent writing tweets. Compare the ratio of this total time to tweet reach, with similar ratio of total time spent on blog to its reach. My guess is that blogging with suddenly seem even more productive.
    Replies, quoted retweets & other conversations — these are mostly a form of quick reactions, unlike a blog post. Even though they count as words, they don’t contribute as original thought, or even as a thought out response. Unlike most of your blog posts. Remove all of those, like your ‘Stud thread’ tweet, and suddenly the ratio gets skewed even more.

    From my personal experience, the year without Twitter has been a big boon. I’ve been way more productive with work, with app development (1.5 new apps), with reading (+50% books yoy), with running (highest mileage year), and more.

    Other side effect: I went from a news junkie to a slow news convert. A few months after quitting Twitter, I also stopped watching all TV news, and unsubscribed from all but one news-letters. Since Twitter wasn’t triggering me about breaking news and nontroversies anymore, it was easier to let go of other news sources as well. I may not be better, but I’m definitely calmer as a result.

    1. Agree. Most of the time wastage on twitter happens in the time when I’m consuming (and endlessly scrolling) rather than when I’m tweeting.

      And also it’s a serious mood dampener – pretty much all the time someone is outraging about something or the other.

      The other side, though, is that a lot of my network expansion over the last 5 years or so has happened due to Twitter. So need to weigh that as well.

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