Cornell Twitter User Study: Mood Factor (part 1 of 2) -

Cornell Twitter User Study: Mood Factor (part 1 of 2)

30 September 2011

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How many of us wake up in the morning, grunt, and look at our phone? I know I do. Whether it is to check the time or how many notifications we have acquired during our slumber, we are synced into social. For me, it’s twitter time. I wake up and quickly reply to all the posts/@mentions that I have received over night. Soon I am engrossed in mass “tweetage”. My mood is a huge factor in what I begin to stream across my feeds; good mood = jokes, business articles, updates, etc. Bad mood = wining, sarcasm, and more jokes to get out of the bad mood. So I ask myself, is this very common? Tweeting in relation to mood? And of course- how does this factor in for me as a Marketer?

Cornell University released a study, “Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures”, which basically means, “moods can be measured and are very similar”. They extracted 400 random messages (tweets) from 2.4 million different Twitter users.

Does your mood impact what you tweet? From this study they were able to gather that 7% (“night owls”) had positive sentiment around the hour of midnight and the average user is positive around breakfast (6am-9am), but then begins to become more negative towards the “almost-done-with-work” time (3pm-4pm). Thankfully dinner perks everyone back up (NYTimes).

Lastly, how does this relate to Marketers? Using the mood data we can see when we should engage and how we should tailor our messages. Meaning, if you are selling, educating, informing, etc. you should send these messages during the peak morning hours. Then later in the day send your encouraging, positive, “you can do it!” posts. Watch as your followers respond.

About Lauren Formalarie

Lauren Formalarie is a Project Manager and Trainer at SayItSocial, focusing on digital marketing strategy and project development as well as live, virtual and eLearning training initiatives.