Synopsis

The evolution of Science, Technology and notably Data Science has made more and better data available. It has made data(unstructured) collection easier and one can even sit in his room and gather data on desired topic and analyse. In this study, the tweets of four telecommunication giants in Nigeria is examined to examine how well these companies are using Twitter to disseminate information to their estemeed customers and as well attend to customer problems.

The study employs the proportion of tweets aimed at providing answers/solutions to customers questions/problems (mentions) or promote the brand (hashtags) to make inference on the activities and possible concentration of this organizations. It is assumed that hastags are meant for promoting brands, new products or disseminate mass information while mentions are to provide a certain information/solution to a single customer problem.

A study of randomly selected 1500 tweets from these telecom giants reveals that Globacom, MTN and Etisalat Nigeria use more than 90% of their tweets to respond to customers problems while Airtel uses above 60% of its tweet to promote the brand. On the other hand, MTN uses its second account better at promoting its brand while Globacom is using both its account to respond to customers with little brand promotion or awareness. Also, it was discovered that for any of the brands to tweet more of either hashtags/replies, it will have to tweet less of replies/hastags.

Introduction

Twitter has proven to be more than another social network platform where people just inform others (those that care anyway) what is going on in their life. It has become an incredible source of unstructured information and a tool for organizations to assess their performance, conduct mini surveys, disseminate information about new products and even provide solutions to customers. Some of these organizations even go as far as owning more than one accounts to aid proper division of labour in providing services to customers. These organizations do these things by creating hastags (#blabla) or mentions (@blabla). Some of such several oragnizations with attention to Nigeria are telecommunication organizations. While hashtags can be viewed as a means of disseminating information to a group, mentions are directed to a person and as such is done by mentioning a specific twitter handle preceded by @. Hashtags can lead to series of retweets popularly referred to as trends while mentions don’t really catch the fancy of the twitter public (except in celeberity battles). To show how important hashtags are, twitter celebrates the hashtags with highest number of retweets every year.

There exist 4 giant telecommunication outfits in Nigeria; Mobile Telecommunication Company (MTN), Globacom, Airtel Nigeria (Airtel) and Etisalat Nigeria (Etisalat). There is a sort of rivalry between these organizations such that they are locked in a cycle of repackaged idea, but not to digress away from the goal of this write-up, an inquiry is made into the tweet type of these organizations. It is important to know that MTN and Globacom operates two twitter handles (MTN180, MTNNG for MTN and GlOCare, GloWorld for Globacom) while Airtel and Etisalt operates an account each.

Proportion of Tweets for Hashtags and Mentions

A breakdown of the latest 1500 tweets of these organizations reveals that Globacom uses above 90% of its tweets from both accounts for mentions and MTN seems to dedicate one of its account to mentions (@MTN180). This is actually expected in the case of MTN as, @MTN180 is made available for customers to tweet their problems at. In the case of Globalcom telecommunications, none of the twitter handles seem to be dedicated to a specific purpose as both tweet more of mentions than hashtags with more than half of the tweets from both handles directed at solving a customer problem.

Airtel Nigeria is the only network that seem not to tweet at specific customers but to disseminate mass information. More than half of this organization’s tweets are hastags although this is not up to 70% of the organizations tweets. The other three on the other hand tweet more at specific customers, with more than 90% of their tweets aimed at replying specific customers tweets.

Some Deeper Insights.

While one is inclined to say that Etisalat, Glo and MTN seem to care about its customers than Airtel, an inferential look at this proportions revelaed that the proportion of hashtags of Airtel over a single twitter handle is significantly higher than the combined propotion of MTN’s and GLO’s by 25%. In other words, while MTN is tweeting more to answer single customers, Airtel is tweeting to disseminate mass information. The same can be said of Airtel and the other networks. A possible reason for Airtel’s lesser mentions compared to the remaining three might be that they have customers who are less active on twitter hence they use other mediums to get their problems solved or the higher tweets of hashtags imply tweeting lesser mentions. Also, Airtel’s use of more hashtags than the remaining three might suggest they have more programs, and possibly promos than the other three networks on twitter. In a nut shell, Airtel significantly uses more hashtags that the other networks.

Another twist to the whole story is, chances that MTN will create an hashtag about something with either of its account is about 41%, that of airtel is 66%, while that of Globacom and Etisalat is lesser than 20%. If you are looking up to hashtags from MTN, follow the @MTNNG twitter handle, this handle tweet hashtags at a significant higher rate compared to @MTN180. For Globacom, following any of the twitter handle doesn’t make a difference as the proportion of tweets that are hashtags from both of their handles aren’t significantly different from each other.

In terms of replies, Airtel is performing significantly lower than the remaining three, infact the proportion of replies from Airtel is significantly lower than that of MTN by 23%. In other words, if you are an Airtel subscriber, you don’t want to tweet at them because chances that you will get answered is below 30%. Etisalat with its single account meausres up to the proportion of replies given out by the two twitter accounts of MTN and GLO. Moreover none of them have a significant edge over the other in terms of replies. Hence, for these three networks, it is good news to their subscribers, if you tweet at them, there more than a 90% chance that there will be a reply but this is only true in the case of @MTN180 and any of the Globacom two accounts.

Can Stakes be Changed?

Can the stakes noticed in these organization tweets be changed? Well sure, it can. Continuous random sampling of 700 tweets out of which proportion of replies and hashtags was computed and repeating this procedure 700 times revealed a negative linear relationship between these two tweet types. Hence, for one tweet type to go up, the other has to come down, given the sampled tweets and provided these organizations decide to leave things the way they are.

If MTN tweets more replies than hashtags by up to an average of 469 via its @MTN180 account out of every 700 tweets, its hashtags will further reduce by 88% and if it chooses to tweet more hashtags than replies by the same amount out of every 700 tweets, its replies will reduce by a mere 19%. For the @MTNNG account, tweeting more replies than hashtags by up to an average of 151 will reduce hashtags by 47%, while tweeting more hashtags than replies by the same amount will decrease replies by 14%.

Should Airtel tweet more hastags than replies on the average by up to 201 out of every 700 tweets, its replies will have to further reduce by 18% but should the organization choose to tweet more replies than hashtags by up to the same amount above, its hashtags will reduce by over 100% (61) on the average.

Globacom’s replies will reduce by 17%, if the organization decides to tweet more hashtags than replies by up to an average of 411 out of every 700 tweets from its @GLOcare account. If it decides to tweet more replies than hashtags at the same rate, then the hashtags will reduce by 155%. If more hastags were tweeted than replies by up to an average of 429 out of every 700 tweets from the @GloWorld account, replies from this account will decrease by 23% on the average, while tweeting more of replies than hashtags by an average of the same amount will reduce hashtags by 176%.

In the case of Etisalat round(absNigeria, tweeting more of hashtags than replies by up to an average of 382, will reduce replies by 27%, while tweeting more of replies than hashtags by the same amount will reduce hastag by 127%.

Note

It must however be noted that several other factors which are not considered in this study, could also influence the rate at which these organizations make use of mentions and hashtags. Thus these findings are subjected to flunctuations in tweet with respect to time and the current campaigns embacked upon by these organizations. It is also important to mention that this study only took 1500 of their latest tweet as at the dat and time Tue Feb 09 22:17:20 2016.

It is also important to note that, this write-up isn’t aimed at claiming one service provider is better than the other but to present an overview of each service provider activities on Twitter.

Appendix

Tweet Type by Mobile Operator Twitter Handles

Relationship Between Replies and Hashtags by Service Providers

Olusoji Oluwafemi Daniel, Owokotomo Olajumoke Evangelina
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