Around the time of our Android study last summer, I collected a snapshot of data relating to the Twitter presence of UK mobile carriers. Working on some research surrounding this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona inspired me to take a fresh look, and see what has changed.

I’ve taken a nose-to-tail view of these data – both qualitative and quantitative (at least to the extent that Twitter lends itself to quants on this limited scale). There’s quite a lot of ground to cover, so I’m going to split the analysis across a series of posts over the next week or so, and wrap it all into a short summary analysis at the end. I’m aiming to:

  1. Deliver an insight into the way different operators are using Twitter: different strategies or tactics, and different degrees of success
  2. Offer a research perspective on the tools that are currently available for collecting and analysing Twitter data

Why’s it interesting? Mobile carriers have a huge affinity to Twitter, and lots of options for how they could choose to use it: as a tool for engaging with stakeholders, a new marketing channel, or both. To promote Twitter as a frontline channel for customer contact, or relegate as a backchannel for the tech-savvy.

And looming over all these juicy choices is the same old issue of reputation management. As Vodafone found out the hard way earlier this month, any serious engagement needs to be managed responsibly.

So, over a few posts I’ll cover:

  • Visibility (in search, and in marketing materials)
  • Activity levels (tweet volume, frequency, trajectory)
  • Engagement data (followers / following / lists / retweets / citations)
  • Content analysis (using automated software tools, including topic classification and sentiment)
  • A “best practice” analysis, covering each operator’s strategic and tactical use of Twitter
  • My opinion on the value of various Twitter analysis tools (and of the value of Twitter data itself as part of a stakeholder insight program)

I’ll start with some raw numbers, coming in the next post.

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