#PSATuesday reveals… something

A word of warning, what follows is a work in progress – I have barely scratched the surface of the data and more updates to this post will follow. If you see an error/have a thought, please let me know. Regarding who gets my money, I will announce that tomorrow as part of #PSATuesday.

Last week about this same time I blogged about my creation of #PSATuesday and encouraged fellow tweeters “to consider those causes important to you, tweet it with the hashtag #PSATuesday.” For more on the story and options please read the post.

A few thoughts – the whole concept of twitter is to express yourself so tweeting about your favorite org or message is, to me, a no brainer especially if someone has asked you to do so. Factor in the possibility of a donation for your favorite cause and it really becomes a no brainer.

Regarding the actual effort, the actions of tweeters are all across the board. Some engaged in support, some simply retweeted and some did nothing. What follows are what I consider to be the key points of the effort and some interesting statistics which have come to light.
My thanks in advance to Matt Galloway (@mattgalloway) and Hetty Fore (@hetty4) for their assistance (Matt is the tech guy behind the raw data and Hetty is the analytics expert at Littlefield.

What follows isn’t scientific – I wish I had the forethought to create this campaign with some level of measurable objectives. Unfortunately this is what happens when you blog from the heart. There is value in the data though and I think some interesting observations can be made. Again, I will apologize in advance for the randomness of what follows. I haven’t yet had a chance to evaluate the data in depth but really wanted to get out this information as we approach our next #PSATuesday. As I have more time to evaluate the data I will update this post with the information and then, ultimately, release all the raw data for you guys to look through.

Regarding the data, here is what I have: Text of any tweet with the #PSATuesday, time of tweet, who tweeted it, their bio, location, number of followers, number following and a few other details. More data is being created with the help of @mattgalloway.

Points of interest:

• Original post was published at www.billhandy.com April 4.
• First tweet went out about the article shortly thereafter and additional blog entries were cross posted on www.propenmic.com and www.oklasocialmediaclub.org both if which generated additional tweets as part of their RSS feed. (I will analyze the referring traffic from these posts in the near future)
• Robert French highlighted my post on PROpenMic and tweeted the effort. (4,000 members of that group)
• 138 individuals and organizations engaged/sent a tweet with #PSATuesday either as a tweet about the effort, a retweet of an original tweet or a tweet supporting their favorite organization
• Overall there were 311 tweets or retweets which included #PSATuesday (including my tweets – I personally tweeted 35 times. Sorry and thanks for not yelling at me)
• There were 96 original tweets (not retweets) which showed some kind of support for a message/org
• ICFJ received the most amount of support from a number of individuals as well as the organization itself (20 tweets)
• 16 people retweeted others tweets of support for a specific cause

Here is what I found most interesting:
44 people retweeted someone else’s message to participate in the effort but then never tweeted any kind of message or support

Some stats about those who only retweeted but didn’t actually engage in any kind of support:

• Followers – 1765
• Following – 1745
• Tweets – 1776

Keep in mind, @chrisbrogan is in this list (I actively engaged him via dm and asked for him to retweet my message which he did – thank you Chris) which is skewing the results just a bit so I ran the numbers again without him and came up with this

• Followers – 486
• Following – 502
• Tweets – 989

Compare this to the stats from those who actively engaged in tweeting support for their favorite message/cause:

• Followers – 544
• Following – 389
• Tweets – 1044

Okay, we have a small skewing of the results again. @shelisreal is in the mix. Remove him and you get the following:

• followers – 384
• Following – 373
• Tweets – 840

Put side by side with the @shelisreal and @chrisbrogan effect removed and the stats look like this
Retweeted but didn’t participate:

• Followers – 486
• Following – 502
• Tweets – 989

Participated:

• followers – 384
• Following – 373
• Tweets – 840

Based on this observation those who follow fewer people, have fewer followers and tweet less often more actively participated in #psatuesday. Could these be the ones who will truly use social media to make a difference (more action than talk – those we really want to reach out to, those with the most power?)

One final observation and this isn’t meant in any way to slight Chris Brogan and all he has done for bloggers, social media and online communication but, as the person with the most retweets (12) of their original retweet of support, none of the people who retweeted his tweet engaged in the actual effort. Obviously this shows the reach of Chris and the value his followers place on his tweets but what does their lack of participation after their retweet show?

Thoughts from the masses on all the above?