August 02, 2014

AAPT Summer meeting twitter analytics #aaptsm14

The Summer meeting of AAPT 2014 has come and gone.  It was fantastic to get to engage with so many incredible teachers, to hear what they are doing in their classrooms, to catch up with old friends, and make some new ones.

The use of twitter at the AAPT conferences has grown over the past few years. Rhett had a post at the end of the 2013 Winter meeting in New Orleans which showed only 116 tweets using the conference hashtag.

This past meeting, there were over 1500 uses of the conference hashtag (#aaptsm14) according to Tweetarchivist. Using the tools from Tweetarchivist and checking some other analytics, I’m guessing that there were at least 42 users who used the conference hashtag to post to twitter not counting users who retweeted a post containing the hashtag.

75% of the tweets came from the top 25 users.  Who was the most prolific tweeter?  @LCTTA had 202 tweets (representing just over 13% of all tweets), compared to AAPT’s official account, which had a respectable 145 tweets (9.6%). Third place went to @rutherfordcasey with 97 tweets (6.4%).  The top 25 users are displayed below. There were a LOT of great tweets from many attendees (and many who were following from home). Check out some of these physics teachers and consider following them!

I made a word cloud of the most popular words used. By far the most popular word was “students” if I counted the twitter abbreviation “Ss”. Also “learning” was slightly more popular than “teaching” 




What about the use of twitter through the week? The amount of tweets during the day took a dip in the middle of the conference, then were strong on the last day:


Screenshot from Tweetarchivist
The most popular phone used to tweet was the iPhone (no idea what model). I’d love to give props to the attendees who were using either a Blackberry (2 tweets posted) or Windows Phone (1 tweet posted) but I have no idea which user was on that one.  The breakdown of clients is shown below. I combined the  iPad and iPhone results, although the iPhone posts dominated.
Breakdown of twitter clients used:

iOS (all clients) 610
Tweetdeck 259
Android (all clients) 227
Web interface 152
Hootsuite 114
Other 148 

Finally, for fun, I have the top mentions of users as well as the other popular hashtags used in posts also tagged with #aaptsm14 - The top users mentioned were @AAPTHQ with 118 mentions.  This makes sense, as there were many people tweeting questions at AAPT.  The next user with the most mentions was @rutherfordcasey, who was organizing many of the meet-ups as well as tweeting about great sessions he was in.  The popular hashtags used included #perc2014 and #modphys.


Top users by posts they made:

Top Users COUNT
LCTTA 202
AAPTHQ 145
rutherfordcasey 97
SciEdHenry 92
drmagoo 90
eigenadam 77
TRegPhysics 57
achmorrison 55
dyanlj 39
fnoschese 37
SteveMaier_ 30
distractons 26
MartaStoeckel 26
QuantumTweep 21
UniverseAndMore 20
SJDJ 19
OpenStax 18
MsPoodry 17
Cabertram92 16
ng_Holmes 16
arundquist 16
rjallain 15
danny_doucette 15
astronomatty 14
MnSTA1 13 

Mentions of users in posts:


Top Users COUNT
@AAPTHQ 118
@rutherfordcasey 114
@EEtkina 65
@LCTTA 58
@SciEdHenry 54
@achmorrison 52
@eigenadam 43
@bohacekp 37
@TRegPhysics 33
@MartaStoeckel 31
@drmagoo 30
@dyanlj 28
@kellyoshea 22
@UniverseAndMore 22
@arundquist 21
@distractons 18
@MsPoodry 17
@chrisgoedde 17
@leetramp 17
@ng_Holmes 17
@MrBWysocki 17
@UMNews 16
@jossives 16
@sciencegeekgirl 13
@phyzman 13 

Popular hashtags used along with #aaptsm14

Hashtags COUNT
#perc2014 38
#modphys 34
#physicsed 31
#ngss 15
#newbies 11
#scavengerhunt 11
#scied 10
#msum 8
#physics 6
#tweetup 6
#directmeasurementphysicsvideos 5
#shameless 5
#minneapolis 4
#dmvideo 4
#perc14 3
#gamedev 3
#dbir 3
#edcampmsmn 3
#umn 3
#arduino 3
#womeninstem 3
#math 3
#scaleup 3
#edtech 3
#starwars

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I regret not making #unsanctioned happen so that it could have made it on this list.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for posting this recap and analysis. Glad to see the Twitter usage continues to grow. As the person behind AAPT's social media presence, I always appreciate feedback and seeing engagement increase among both meeting attendees and those who are following the conversation.

Andrew said...

RaShonda, thanks for the work you put in to make @AAPTHQ a great resource for AAPT members. There are other physics societies I know that could learn from AAPT's example.