A Different Way To See Twitter Data

This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Sanjeet Matharu is the Lead Technology Creative for Brand Strategy, Europe, Middle East and Africa for Twitter, has also worked with big brands like Samsung and Vodafone, Sanjeet is an ecosystem builder and has experience working in EMEA. He was present at Startup Istanbul 2014 and delivered a session on the power of data and ad-tech to companies.

Sanjeet’s broad experience working with several big brands including Samsung, Vodafone, and Twitter has exposed him to various insights, he is a strong advocate of ecosystems and partnership, and has been able to work across cultures and geographies to understand how the application of technology is important throughout the course of his career.

Data has come to stay and companies are beginning to understand that using data the right or wrong way, can make or mar a business, Sanjeet Matharu explains the concept of using Twitter data the right way online.

In other to provide some context to this piece, the first question to ask is “what is twitter?”, one way to describe it is that Twitter is the shortest distance between you and what interests you most, currently, we have all these data out there on twitter, how do we know what’s important and what is not.

As at 2014, Twitter had about 271 million users, and there were over 500 million tweets every day, the first tweet was sent out in 2006 by Jack Dorsey (Co-founder of Twitter), three years later in 2009, Twitter witnessed its first billion tweets accumulated through the first three years of its existence. Now, Twitter gets 1 billion tweets every two days, that is a lot of data going out at the moment.

Another interesting part of Twitter is that 77% of Twitter users are outside of the United States, what that means to you, as a startup, is that is a huge amount of data that a lot of people are not tapping in to, especially from a local perspective.

Twitter is the pulse of the world, the data is very accessible, it’s a matter of understanding it and making sure it works for you and helping you enhance your products as you develop them, learning how things are done in a macro or a smaller scale. The conversations are paramount, one of the biggest hashtags on Twitter was the #worldcup2014 hashtag, seeing about 672 million tweets with the hashtag, which is a lot of data laying there. Through Twitter you have an opportunity to figure out what exactly people are talking about, 35 million tweets were sent during the Brazil vs Germany match, but the conversation around that made everyone get involved.  

Asides from the global conversations, Twitter allows you to share very personal moments, Sanjeet mentions a morning where he puts out a tweet with the hashtag #mornings after having breakfast with his son. As an entrepreneur, figuring out how to make Twitter data work in your favor might just be key.                     

https://youtu.be/9PKpUxZbl-g