Taking the pulse of your next event with Twitter analytics

Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar reports a very interesting analysis of Twitter data at the WordCamp event in San Francisco.  Pathable, an event social networking company, did the analysis.

This chart shows the life cycle of activity over the course of an event.  During the event itself, the bulk of activity is around “here’s what I am doing/feeling” in red, direct messages to people in green, and comments or quotes about speakers in aqua.

Event tweets provide a rich source of data for taking the pulse of the event community.  Brady Forrest has an interesting starting list of suggestions:

• Community Pulse – What’s the mood of the attendees? Negative or positive? What’s the tag cloud look like?
• Community Connectedness – How many retweets are there? How many people are following each other? Is that number growing over the course of the event?
• Engagement – What percentage of tweets being sent out by the community are using the tag?
• Growth – Are more people using the tag? How many new users are we gaining/losing per hour?
• Influencers – Who are the most connected tweeters in the group?
• Locations – Where do people claim they are? Or more likely, are from?

There are rich possibilities in mining twitter for a portrait of an event community.  If you have any suggestions about data you’d like to see in the dashboard of our next release, please comment or email us with your ideas.