In this latest post of what has now become a series on law professor use of blogging and Twitter for marketing, I want to focus on why law professors might tweet. As part of this, I have some additional data about tweeting trends that bear on the question, and I'm indebted to Ryan Whalen for gathering the data for me. Note that some of the data from my prior post is incomplete, because the Twitter API cut off data for high users and did not include automatic retweets. The new data includes all this.
This post is informed with discussions I've had with my friends, both law professor and not, about Twitter, by discussions with marketing folks, by the data we've got, and by sheer speculation. At the end of the day, I believe how one views law professor tweeting will depend in large part on priors about law professors and how they are supposed to be spending their time.
It should be noted, though, that law professors may well use twitter differently than other types of professors and even other types of twitter users. I mentioned in my initial study post that I would discuss how I would expand the research design. One way would be to compare law professor users to twitter users in other fields (do we see chemists tweeting? maybe not as much) and to a random sample of twitter users (do professors tweet different information than Katy Perry or Jane Doe? probably).
But just because there is no control group doesn't mean that we can't look at how law professors use Twitter, if only to better understand law professor behavior, whatever your priors.
Consumption
I'll admit that from a consumption point of view, I find Twitter to be utterly useless. It's like drinking from a fire hose, and there are not enough hours in the day to parse all of the information that comes in. This is exacerbated by the fact that I follow Slate and Cracked. Between the two of them, that can mean hundreds of tweets in a day or week. I don't blame them - in a scrolling news-flash world, you have to repeat your post lest it be lost in the blink of an eye. Twitter is like the original snapchat. But I hate it for that reason.
However, I know that some people consume Twitter. Friends who use it swear to me that you can manage information using targeted lists of trusted tweeters. Or Tweetdeck might separate lists. Or hashtags allow you to follow a live-tweeted conference; this is something I have done in the past.
We also know that some professors are using Twitter for consumption (or not at all). A new histogram showing all tweets since Between Dec. 1 and Jan. 31 is below. Despite adding a months to the study, 14% still have zero tweets. This is not active tweeting; this is consumption. On the other hand, some people tweet...a lot (some more than 3000 in two months).
Lifetime tweeting data shows that this trend is representative. The following histogram shows total tweets by all law professors -- there is a steep dropoff. Of course, because people joined at different times over the last seven years, these numbers cannot be extrapolated to any kind of monthly rate.
Furthermore, the average lawprof follows 523 people, with a median of 257 and standard deviation of 894. More than 25% of professors follow more than the number of law professors using Twitter and more than 50% follow more users than the most followed law professor. In other words, Twitter using lawprofs follow others besides lawprofessors, many of them in great numbers. They follow news sites, journalists, celebrities, satirical publications, and more. But following outside the professor network is a sign of consumption.
Messaging
In some ways, Twitter has replaced Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram, what have you, as a way to message, but it's a very public way of messaging. I suspect this is more true of non-professor users. The new data pull shows about 21% of all tweets since December 1 are replies to others. There may be private messages that people use, but can't be measured. I know I don't use it very often.
Marketing/Networking
It is hard to deny that Twitter use by professors is a form of marketing. The question, really, is marketing what. Marketing one's own scholarship must only be a small portion. The most prolific professor might write ten articles a year, and the average law professor writes far less than that. Twitter could be an announcement service for new works being available on SSRN, but professors that post four times per year are unlikely to garner much followers. My last post showed that high posters had the most followers/and vice versa.
Of course, there are more direct marketing things to tweet about: blog postings, conference appearances, school happenings, and the like. This might increase the volume of pure marketing tweets. I calculate that 9.8% of non-retweeted, link-bearing tweets contain ego words (I, my, I'm, me).
This is not to say that one shouts into the wind by tweeting only so often. The entire point of the Twitter network is that it is a network. One tweet can be read by followers, and one follower can retweet to a bigger group, who might retweet to a bigger group. This is how stuff "trends." I think it is thoroughly ridiculous that the news discusses hashtags that a few thousand people on Twitter write, but there you have it. And once it hits the TV news, there's a much bigger audience.
Professors might also market themselves by tweeting information (not just their own work) in a niche, usually associated with their scholarly area. The benefit of this is that one might become known, at least among a group of followers, as an expert in this area, or a provider of a valuable service. My data shows that the mean number of retweets and favorite tweets grows slightly with the number of followers, but in large part the distribution of resharing is not directly tied to followers. This implies that the network is important, as the right followers can increase exposure.
There are also other forms of marketing, which involves simply being part of the some a conversation. So, for example, professors might spend most of their tweets on retweeting themselves, rather than relying on others to retweet for them. The following is a histogram of the retweet rate. At the left is a 100% retweet rate: all tweets originated elsewhere. On the right is a 0% retweet rate, where every tweet is original. The histogram shows a skewed normal distribution - some people never retweet, some retweet all the time, and most are somewhere in between.
Thus, the marketing angle is that professors might become better known for their tweeting activity, and it's not simply a frivolous activity that will fall on deaf ears. While it's true that the number of followers may never be huge, it can be a solid cohort of like-minded individuals. Ryan Whalen's network graphic shows, for example, that there is a strong group of IP/Tech professors that use Twitter.That's not a huge surprise, I suppose.
But let's not fool ourselves; my latest article on the patent system is not going to go viral on Twitter. I know it's not. I post using Hootsuite, which allows me to see how many people download each link I post. My best one, ever, was like 80. And much of that traffic came from a private email list and not Twitter, I believe. An interesting blog post might bring 10-20 hits via that particular share, some of which are from Facebook. Of course, others might learn about the link from Twitter, and then share it using another service that does not track back to me.
The following chart shows the distribution of retweeted and favorited posts. About 27% of posts are not retweeted or favorited, 19% are retweeted/favorited once, and 11% are shared twice, with a total of 57% receiving 0-2 such hits and 75% receiving 6 or fewer. But there's a long tail to the right. The mean number of retweets/favorites was 77, with a standard deviation of 1257 and a maximum of nearly 97,000
So why tweet?
So why tweet if the chances are low that any one tweet will make a huge impact and half the time two or fewer people will like it enough to retweet or favorite it? And why spend any effort posting anything other than pure self-promotion if the list of followers is low? I think there are three possible answers to that.
Navel Gazing
First, as proposed by some comments in my prior posts, law professors may just be so self absorbed and out of touch that they can't help themselves. They simply must tweet because they are ready for their close-ups, even if there's no camera rolling. I think this explanation fails for a couple reasons. First, I know enough professors to know that they won't waste time on something they think is not bringing value, even if the supposed value is only to them. After all, less than 10% (rough estimate) of law professors tweet. So the other 90% might not see any value. And among those who tweet admittedly for marketing reasons in addition to any others, they would not do so if they felt the results would not yield some value as opposed to talking to no one.
Knowledge Sharing
Second, a desire to add and share knowledge. Skeptics (that is, people who do believe the first reason) simply cannot understand why this might be. And this, I think, goes to a debate about the core of what law professors are supposed to do. But I note the irony of the argument that law professors insulate themselves from the law and society, while also criticizing them for tweeting information about the law to members of the public. I also note that law professors have more than 460,000 unqiue followers, even if you exclude the 324,000 that follow Larry Lessig. That's a lot of potential listeners for about 580 tweeting law professors.
Below is a pie chart showing the rough contents of tweets. About 53% of the tweets include links to other content. These are split roughly evenly between newly shared links and retweeted links originally shared by others.
The data implies that professors are spending a lot of their tweet energy either a) sharing information posted by others, or b) sharing links to articles, stories, etc. that are not their own. I also believe this data provides some answers to the more cynical view that law professors are merely using the site to promote themselves with no value added.
The next chart expands on this, showing the rough content of each tweet. I've included content type for tweets that have links and tweets that do not.
The chart shows a few trends.
- Many (more than 40%) of tweets without links are replies to other tweeters. When professors are not sharing content, they are communicating with others.
- The link tweets contain many more mentions of other tweeters, implying that the links are promoting the work of others more than themselves.
- As discussed above, ego words only appear in about 14% of link tweets - there is only so much that one can tweet about themselves. Further, some of these words may appear in retweets, so that the ego words are actually of the original tweeter, and not the retweeter.
- About 9% of the link tweets were replies to other tweets. In other words, professors are communicating with other users by sharing information.
- Most of the replies for both types are to non-law professors. The interaction taking place on Twitter is outside insular law school academia.
The charts below shows a dot distribution of all link sharing and new link sharing by professors. The dots are weighted by the number followers. The chart shows that there are people who only share links and people who share no links, but that the professors with the most followers land somewhere in the middle. The second chart shows that this carries over to new links. The users who post more new links at the expense of retweeted links do not have more followers. Instead, it appears that a mix of tweeted links, retweeted links, and engagement with other tweeters is best correlated with more followers.
Nonetheless, this is a second area where I would improve study design, if I had the resources. I would code each post on a 7 point scale (you can do better regressions on it if you do this):
1 Navel Gazing - pure "look how great I am"
2 Engagement with another user - no content
3 Promotional post, but with content (my new study...)
4 Practical - content relating to some practical issue - reporting or op-ed type stuff
5 Court activity - decisions, analysis, with or without link
6 Policy - link to policy information, or real policy analysis without link
7 Scholarly - sharing of other people's scholarship or real analysis without link
These categories would give us a better sense of what is actually being discussed by professors. The scale is better than my rough estimates for the obvious reason that they are more granular and someone is looking at them, but also because they give value to analysis that comes without a link. Some users post really great case analysis, for example, 140 characters at a time. It could be coded on Mechanical Turk for about $500 at one cent per tweet, and maybe less by some research assistants. But that's $500 I'm not going to spend. Maybe some marketing professor has spare resources lying around.
Policy Influence
Third, a desire to impact policy. The odds are low that any one tweet will make a difference. But perhaps one will make it and be reshared by Katy Perry (or Larry Lessig). Or perhaps a journalist will pick it up. Or perhaps a court clerk might see an article. Or perhaps if there are enough tweets by enough people, someone will notice the importance of policy or a particular study.
Should law professors be doing this? I think so, though I can see how someone might see these efforts as a professor's primary public face and assume it is all he or she is doing. I think that's a distorted view of things, which is one reason I don't like Twitter much, despite my defense of its use.
Conclusion
I don't claim that professors want to impact policy or share information magnanimously. I could do a survey, but I'm guessing most of my colleagues would admit there is a at least some marketing component to Twitter. Given that the marginal expected impact of a given tweet is low, it's not surprising to me that we see clustering at very few tweets and that there are secondary scholarly and service based reasons to use the service.
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