Evaluating Effectiveness hopes you enjoyed AAPOR 2013. We have been tracking the conference’s twitter activity and wanted to make the twitter data we have collected available to everyone. We used a proprietary system to store all tweets relating to AAPOR. To determine qualification, tweets need to contain “aapor”, “aaporbuzz”, or “surveypost”.
#aapor was the most common twitter hashtag used. We do not include the “#” sign to insure we capture tweets with and without it.
aaporbuzz should not add any posts that were not picked up with just aapor but was included as a check.
Surveypost was included as most #aaporbuzz questions came out of their twitter account. In case someone just responded at them we wanted to catch those messages as well.
Reviewing the number of new tweets captured over time, the volume of tweets never approached the capacity limit of out system. At no time during the conference did our system experience any technical difficulties. As a result, we are confident that we have every post which Twitter made available (note that for extremely frequent words, they will only release a sample of the full volume to the public. Only a few companies have agreements to have access to everything. As only a few thousand tweets were published over several days, we do not believe that was the case. For example, it seems the busiest time averaged 5 tweets per minute which is not fast for Twitter.
While we believe that this data set is a complete set of tweets using out search terms we make no guarantees to that extent. Anyone is welcome to use this information but we request that you site Evaluating Effectiveness as the source if you publish anything about it.
About the fields
Counter – Auto number from oldest to newest
Idnum – Twitter’s id number (this is not unique)
OrigDate – The date the tweet was sent adjusted for EST
OrigTime- The time the tweet was sent adjusted for EST
Title – The text of the tweet
Content – Test of the tweet in HTML
TwitterHandle – Identifier for the person who sent the tweet.
TweetURL – takes you to the orig tweet on Twitter.. if it is a RT Twitter will show the original tweet
All of the data we are releasing is publicly available. Evaluating Effectiveness does not have access beyond that of the public. We are publishing the author of each post so you can follow up on posts but we have removed all the meta-data (like GPS coordinates) to protect individuals privacy.
Enjoy the data and let us know if you have any questions.
