
Buzzfeed using Twitter data to show which social startups are in decline - kingasif
http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/social-decay-how-tweets-can-predict-the-death-of-an-app?utm_source=CB+Insights+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6df4d3e618-RealEstateTech_09_10_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9dc0513989-6df4d3e618-86846413#.hwp63dG1A
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danso
This is a pretty good and underused idea -- places like Crunchbase
conveniently have a list of Twitter accounts tied to companies -- and of
course, the funding activity of those companies in a joinable table. Startups
may not always have a super active account or following, but most of them are
savvy enough to use Twitter/FB/etc efficiently to post news releases and
updates. If you poll a bunch of Twitter startup profiles, do a quick
calculation of tweets/day over account lifetime versus tweets/day in the past
two or four weeks, and make a simple score, when possible, that includes time
since last funding...wouldn't that provide a decent amount of signal vs.
noise?

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minimaxir
The reason is that Twitter data is _expensive_ , and processing it in a
scalable manner is even more expensive.

BuzzFeed cheated by using an aggregator with a URL search, which biases the
results slightly since apps use URLs differently. (The correct way to do it
would be to quantify Tweet sources from those apps over time)

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danso
What I propose doesn't have to be that expensive. How many active startups are
there today? Too lazy to re-open up my old copy of CrunchBase...but let's say
there's 10,000. The Twitter API let's you perform nearly 18,000 user lookups.
With each lookup, you get current number of followers and tweets, and you also
get their latest Tweet as an object. If you approach this in the most brute,
blunt force way -- paginating through every account's timeline...even if each
account was at 3,200 tweets (which is relatively rare for small company
accounts that haven't yet brought in a social media team), it would only take
you 18 days to collect every single tweet. However...what's the point in doing
that? You could also just do a fetch for 200 tweets per user in a single call
and extrapolate the tweeting rate for all 10,000 companies on a daily
basis...very few Twitter accounts will send out more than 200 tweets in a 2
day period (and for those that did, you can assume that they're still
kicking...or are going on a bender).

The analysis doesn't have to be real-time...companies usually implode as a
slow burn. If you look at companies like Ashley Madison and Superfish (OK,
only the latter is a startup)...they pretty much shut up on Twitter as soon as
things blew up. But companies that slowly lose steam...I imagine firing the
social media person, or even just having much less heart into social media, is
a common symptom. And one that is hard to see unless you're frequently
checking on a specific company...but relatively easy to see in a simple
statistical analysis. Yes, there would be false positives...but 20-50 false
positives a couple of weeks versus 10,000 potential false negatives to check
up on is still an advantageous situation.

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minimaxir
Hmm, that math with the rate limits does work.

With Twitter's stance on third party data usage, it would be risky, but I
think the idea could work.

