Tag: tweets

I don’t know which 80%

Legendary retailer John Wanamaker (who pioneered fixed price stores in the mid 1800s) is supposed to have said that “half of all advertising is useless. The trouble is I don’t know which half”.

I was playing around with my twitter archive data, and was looking at the distribution of retweets and favourites across all my tweets. To say that it follows a power law is an understatement.

Before this blog post triggers an automated tweet, I have 63793 tweets, of which 59,275 (93%) have not had a single retweet. 51,717 (81%) have not had a single person liking them. And 50, 165 (79%) of all my tweets have not had a single retweet or a favourite.

In other words, nearly 80% of all my tweets had absolutely no impact on the world. They might as well have not existed. Which means that I should cut down my time spent tweeting down to a fifth. Just that, to paraphrase Wanamaker, I don’t know which four fifths I should eliminate!

There is some good news, though. Over time, the proportion of my tweets that has no impact (in terms of retweets or favourites – the twitter dump doesn’t give me the number of replies to a tweet) has been falling consistently.

Right now, this month, the score is around 33% or so. So even though the proportion of my useless tweets have been dropping over time, even now one in every tweets that I tweet has zero impact.

My “most impactful tweet” itself account for 17% of all retweets that I’ve got. Here I look at what proportion of tweets have accounted for what proportion of “reactions” (reactions for each tweet is defined as the sum of number of retweets and number of favourites. I understand that the same person might have been retweeted and favourited something, but I ignore that bit now).

Notice how extreme the graph is. 0.7% of all my tweets have accounted for 50% of all retweets and likes! 10% of all my tweets have accounted for 90% of all retweets and likes.

Even if I look only at recent data, it doesn’t change shape that much – starting from January 2019, 0.8% of my tweets have accounted for 50% of all retweets and likes.

This, I guess, is the fundamental nature of social media. The impact of a particular tweet follows a power law with a very small exponent (meaning highly unequal).

What this also means is that anyone can go viral. Anyone from go from zero to hero in a single day. It is very hard to predict who is going to be a social media sensation some day.

So it’s okay that 80% of my tweets have no traction. I got one blockbuster, and who knows – I might have another some day. I guess such blockbusters is what we live for.

Budget Analysis

So I finally finished going through today’s Mint and noticed that most of it was filled with analysis of the budget. I tried reading most of them, and didn’t manage to finish any of them (save Anil Padmanabhan’s I think). Most of them were full of globe, each had an idea that could have been expressed in a few tweets, rather than a full column.

Thinking about it, I guess I was expecting too much. After all, if you are calling captains of the industry and sundry bankers and consultants to write about the budget, I don’t think you can expect them to come out with much honest analysis. Think about their incentives.

As for corporate guys, you will expect them to make the usual noises and perhaps be partisan in their judgment. You can expect them to crib about those parts of the budget that shortchanged their company or industry or sector or whatever. But you don’t need them in an op-ed to tell you that – it is obvious to you if you read the highlights, or some rudimentary analysis that the paper anyway provides.

However, these guys won’t want to rub the ruling party the wrong way, so they fill up the rest of their essays with some globe about how it is a “progressive” budget or a “pro-poor” budget or some such shyte. So far so good.

The think tank guys are probably better. At least they don’t have any constituency to pander to, and they can give a good critical analysis. However, as academics (and most likely, not being bloggers) what they write is usually not very easy to read, and so what they say (which might actually contain something useful) can be lost to the reader.

The worst of all are the fat-cat consultants and bankers. The reason they write is primarily to gain visibility for themselves and for their firm, and given how lucrative government business is for these guys (look at the ridiculously low fees these guys charge for government IPOs, and you’ll know) they have absolutely no incentive to tell something useful, or honest. Again these guys aren’t used to writing for a general audience. So you can expect more globe.

All that I needed to learn about the budget I learnt by way of a brief unopinionated summary sent in an internal email at work yesterday (it took me 2 mins to read it on my blackberry). And also Anil Padmanabhan’s cover page article in today’s Mint.

update:

I must mention I wrote this post after I’d read the main segment of today’s Mint. Starting to read the “opinion” supplement now, and it looks more promising