Bachmann versus Palin -- who really cares?
The mass media have shown they care. They think of this as an appealing story. At least that would seem to be the reason for pasteing it all over their pages. But does anyone else care?
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The figure gives the results of two months -- May and June of 2011 -- searching for Twitter messages containing both Bachmann and Palin. The dark line at 666 Tweets on the Y axis gives the mean number of messages per day. There is a good deal of spiking around this mean, of course. And the spikes look quite impressive. But the spikes top out at just 3,200 messages.
How can we tell if that is major or minor Twitter attention to what has the mass media writers all a-twitter?
Well, it is not very close to 200 million messages a day, which is what Twitter just announced is the current volume of messaging [TNW, 6/30/2011]. However, that is probably too high a standard.
Another way to assess the numbers is to look at the readership of the Bachmann - Palin messages. 40,327 messages were posted by 6573 people. Readership is the number of people following the people posting each message. The readership for these 40K messages was 14,127,232. We do not know that the messages were read 14 million times just as all we know from Nielsen ratings is the number of TV sets that were on. The 14 million is the number of times the messages may have been read. And 14 million is an impressive number even if spread over two months; 7 million a month is a big number. But it is possible to look at which posters produced the 14 million reach. The 10 posters with the greatest reach produced half, 7,182,581, of the 14 million reach. The top 10 included CBSnews, Newsweek, WashingtonPost, reuters, and latimestot -- all mass media. The other 5 are BESTat, which is a humor blog, KeithOlbermann, who used to be mass media before 'retiring', alicam, stephenkruiser, and BizWomen2Day. The five mass media posters had a reach of 5,059,835 or most of the 7 million. Those 5 mass media posters had just over one-third of the total reach for the two months. Reach of 14 million is impressive. The reach of the top mass media posters at 5 million was also impressive; this is the mass media a-twitter.
Another possible comparison is between the number of Twitter messages Bachmann and Palin each receive and the number of messages that include both. In the last two weeks of June Twitter messages mentioning Palin averaged 9256 per day compared to an average of 666 for Bachmann-Palin. This was a typical period for Palin. For Bachmann the last two weeks of June included the largest number of Twitter messages of the entire spring when she announced she would run for the Republican nomination. The average for the two weeks was 11,438. And the two days Bachmann-Palin spiked at 3,200 messages Bachmann was mentioned in 42,544 and 36,869 messages.
People who tweet about the Republican candidates are interested in Bachmann and in Palin. The interest in Bachmann-Palin is dwarfed by the interest in them individually. Mass media do "and." For the most part Twitter users have not been doing "and."