Social Media, Sociality, and Survey Research

CHAPTER 9

Collecting Diary Data on Twitter

Ashley Richards, Elizabeth Dean, and Sarah Cook,

RTI International

Twitter is a social media tool that allows users to send and receive quick, frequent messages—called Tweets—of 140 characters or less. Tweets are posted to a user's Twitter profile page, can be linked to blogs and other social media profiles (such as Facebook and LinkedIn pages), and are searchable within Twitter's search engine. Twitter describes itself as an information network rather than as a social media platform because the critical element of the Twitter experience is not the user's profile or connections, but the information contained in each Tweet (Twitter, 2012a). Although many Twitter users are individuals, businesses, organizations, and media increasingly use Twitter accounts for information dissemination and product sharing.

Active Twitter users submit regular updates on Twitter about what is happening in their lives. Tweets often describe ordinary occurrences such as what people ate for breakfast or what movie they saw last night. This kind of daily, habitual reporting is similar to the type of information that researchers aim to collect in diary studies—surveys characterized by frequent self-report of the events and experiences in people's lives. In this chapter, we (1) describe the potential, benefits, and drawbacks of collecting diary data on Twitter; (2) describe the process we used to collect data on Twitter in a pilot diary study; and (3) report the ...