You can't properly estimate the impact

[arzina221]

Not everything is public and easy to find
WhatsappAn important limitation when you want to include social media in a research is that not all messages that may be relevant to your research are visible. The main reason for this is that not everything is public on social media. Think for example of the closed sites at Facebook and the shielded accounts on Twitter. Also do not forget other possibilities to stay in touch with each other, such as WhatsApp and pinging via BlackBerrys.

In addition, not all information is easy to find. In our research into social media and social unrest, only messages that surfaced based on search terms and hashtags were included in the analysis. All messages without these search terms were therefore outside the scope of this research.


The inability to properly estimate the impact of social media messages is another limitation. 6,000 tweets about a certain incident can have more impact than 500,000 tweets about another incident. This is partly because it is not possible to see who has read which tweets. The number of messages found about the incidents says nothing about the impact of these messages.

project_x_wallpaper_by_lilgamerboy14-d5i8x76An example is a tweet from a teenager in Hoorn, in which he calls for a Project X party. The tweet had an effect, despite the fact that the message was not widely distributed. The impact of social media messages depends on several factors, such as the number of followers of an account, the namibia phone data number of visitors to a website and how often the message is linked to other websites. Another element is the reach of a tweet. For example, Twitter users can forward tweets to others. The reach of a tweet is increased in this way, but this is not visible when monitoring social media.

Reach and impact
Twitter now emails its users weekly overviews containing a selection of tweets that the user in question may find interesting. Although the actual reach of messages on social media cannot be determined, tools such as Tweetreach can provide insight into the potential reach of messages on social media. If a message contains a link, Google Analytics can be used to find out how many people clicked on the link.

But even then, the reach is not decisive for the impact of a message. The number of times a message is retweeted is therefore not decisive for the impact of the message in question. This also applies to the number of followers of a tweeter. Of course, the number of followers influences the impact of the tweets of a certain user, but what that influence is exactly, cannot be said. You can have 10,000 followers and then tweet a message that is read by 500 people. Then we leave aside the fact that there may also be ' fake followers ' among them (which you can even buy).