Obama’s Flock
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 by Rob Brown
At the heady summit of social media marketing lies the promise of effective measurement and evaluation. There is no doubt that twitter is the flavour of the month and a new application called Twittersheep provides a fascinating measurement tool which helps us take a few more steps towards this objective.
I decided to start with the most followed twitter account; that of US president Barack Obama who has close to 300,000 followers. What Twittersheep does is to make a word cloud from the profiles of all of a user’s followers. Whilst Obama’s following is far from a random sample it is a big number so we might draw some broad conclusions. Twitter has a high student following. It appears that the male female split is roughly equal with husband and wife evenly weighted in Obama’s cloud. It also looks like the marketing industry is providing a good proportion of the social networks’ early adopters.
Potentially Twittersheep and similar apps could provide brands that use twitter and build large follower groups with highly valuable insights into both the demographic and psychographic profiles of consumers with an interest in their brand.
