Thank you to everyone who completed the survey. We received 217 responses.
Below is a simplified visual representation of survey responses.
To read the research findings, please click here. Please note that this research project has not been graded yet and all findings are preliminary.
1. What won’t you tweet about? And Why?
This was an open-ended question. All the responses to this question are visualised in the word cloud below. It is important to remember that sometimes people mention what they DO tweet about in order to explain what they won’t tweet about.
2. What are the main reasons why you unfollow people?
This was a closed question with checkboxes. Users who ticked the “other” option mentioned the following:
They retweet other people’s tweets as their own; Inconsequential rants; They tweet “wisdom quotes”; They attack others; Endless, inane personal trivialities; Too many repeat tweets; Twitter limits how many people I can follow; and They only ever tweet about one subject.
3. Without looking at your follower list, who do you think follows you? Who reads your tweets?
This was a closed question with checkboxes.
4. Go to www.twitter.com and scroll through your follower list. Does this correspond to what kinds of people you thought were following you?
This was an open-ended question. Responses were grouped into the following:
5. How often do you look at your follower list?
This was an open-ended question and was added later on in the survey.
* When considering the results of this study, it is important to keep in mind that this is a qualitative study and although respondents were diverse, it cannot be regarded as a representative sample. When studying Twitter it is impossible to stratify data based on demographic information, or to do random sampling, as Twitter does not release demographic information or contact details of its users.
